The Distance from A to Z

by Natalie Blitt

  “Merde.”

  The silence sits between us, not uncomfortable but present. “I never thought that first kiss was a mistake,” I admit. “I was scared because you shut down and I thought—”

  “I’m sorry.” The words are quick like a slingshot, like he doesn’t want my thought completed. “I’ve been dealing with some stuff related to my injury, and maybe I haven’t been doing the best job.”

  I pause, hoping there’s more, there’s an explanation of the ups and downs, what’s happening in Boston, but as the silence enters a second beat, I can’t take it anymore. I don’t care if there’s stuff he’s keeping from me. There’s time for that.

  “Does this mean . . .” I don’t know what it means. And please don’t make me explain what I mean by this. Because I can’t take the withdrawal. I can’t do casual. I can’t—

  “I want us to be more than French partners,” he says, smiling, eyes on me. Eyes that are steady, open. I sift through the words, looking for an uncertainty, but it’s hard to concentrate with all those stupid butterflies—papillons—swirling inside. “And I want you to know that I don’t like Chloe the way I like you.”

  I bite down on my bottom lip, hard. I want Zeke to say more, to say that nothing ever happened with Chloe or Stephie, but I know he can’t. And I can’t fault him for what came before.

  “More than French partners?” I lean forward. “Badminton partners too?”

  A slow smile awakens his face again. “You don’t like sports.”

  I lean forward another tiny quarter inch. We shouldn’t be talking anymore; there are so many better things to do. But . . .

  I love this. “Badminton isn’t a sport.”

  “Stop,” he groans, and I can’t help it; I sink into Zeke. I sink and holy everything that is holy, this. Those callused fingertips? Incredible as they slip down my arms, opening every pore, every atom in my body. Zeke leans to the side, pulling me down onto the bed beside him, our lips still discovering, playing, god almighty I don’t even know. He pulls me closer, our legs intertwining, closer.

  And even though our mouths are desperate for each other, words still come out. Words like belle and tu m’étonnes toujours. Beautiful and you always surprise me. Words like s’il te plaît, please, and encore, again.

  And then we slow. We slow because it’s too much to keep going faster. It’s perfect just being here, not needing to move forward. His lips stroke across my jaw, down my neck, and I’d do anything to keep this going forever. Forever and ever, in this room. Nothing else. Not the knocking on the door, not the “Abby?” Not the “shit” Alice says as she walks in.

  I tuck my head into Zeke’s chest, wishing I could hide inside him.

  “Hey, Alice.” He smiles. “We were just watching a movie.”

  I snort, trying desperately to keep the laughter inside. Because we weren’t so much watching the movie as reenacting it.

  “So, you and Zeke?” Alice asks as she flops down on her bed. “I was beginning to think you guys would wait it out until the last day of school.”

  I can’t help it; I touch my lips, my cheek, my jaw. All the places his lips were, the places I can still feel him. Is it normal to feel like this?

  “I . . .” Apparently words are not my friend. I need to put a verb next but I don’t know which to use because no verb is strong enough for this. No verb aptly describes the feeling that your skin is alive, that your heart won’t stop racing, that you long to roll around in your bed and remember what it felt like. That you feel real and powerful and out of control and maybe like you want to cry a little. Okay, a lot.

  Alice slips off her bed and comes to sit beside me, just where Zeke had been.

  “You okay?” she whispers.

  And I don’t even know how to tell her just how okay I am.

  NINETEEN

  I JOKE WITH ZEKE THAT we need to make up words to put in our log book because the words we’re speaking in French aren’t appropriate for class.

  Words like:

  Your mouth. Ta bouche.

  Your eyes. Tes yeux.

  You’re so beautiful. Tu es si belle.

  Can I kiss you here? Puis-je t’embrasser ici?

  What about here? Et ici?

  And here? Et ici?

  Please. S’il te plaît.

  And then there are the words I think in my head. His fingers. Ses doigts. His skin. Son peau.

  And then the words that are buried so far in my subconscious. The words I feel as he kisses me, over and over again. My jaw. My neck. Please. Again. Please.

  The light scoring of his nails down my arms. The feeling of another body wrapped around mine as we nap in the middle of the day.

  Perfect. Parfait.

  Ideal. Idéal.

  Except when his phone pings at the most inappropriate times. Like when we’re watching the super sexy bits in another movie we’re assigned, the bits that make him pull me closer, the bits that make me want to turn off the computer and take a break. Now all I want to do is watch French movies with Zeke and make out.

  Except his phone keeps pinging.

  And when he sees the number, he actually growls at the phone.

  “If you swear, I’ll make you wear an embarrassing T-shirt.” I laugh.

  But he doesn’t join in. He leans forward to hit the pause button on my laptop, then scoots me off his lap and onto the bed. And answers the phone.

  “One second,” he says, and his voice is rough. This isn’t the Zeke whose fingers were making tiny circles around my belly button moments ago. This isn’t the Zeke who kept whispering suggestive comments in my ear.

  This is Outside Zeke.

  “Be right back,” he says, as he makes his way out my door. “No, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to someone in the room.”

  And then the door shuts behind him.

  The door. La porte.

  Closes. Ferme.

  Behind him. Derrière lui.

  Someone in the room.

  By the time Zeke gets back, I have the lights back on, the computer closed, and I’m sitting at my desk. I have an article from La Presse open in front of me but I don’t recognize the words. Mostly because they’re swimming in front of me.

  I wish Alice were here. I wish there were some way that I could not be here while he’s here. I wish that I don’t notice that he’s packing up his bag, getting ready to leave.

  Someone in the room.

  Quel-qu’un? I should put it on the list but I’m not sure if it’s right, and god do I hate French right now. I hate that the only words I remember are ta bouche and tes yeux and s’il te plaît and bisou. And the sound of Zeke’s fingers as they sweep through my hair, and the way I get goose bumps on my arms when his teeth graze my jaw. And the fact that goose bumps in French are chair de poule, the flesh of the chicken, instead of des bosses d’oie, which is what they should be.

  “Abby?”

  But more than anything I hate that there’s a zero percent chance that Zeke will leave here without being able to tell that I’m crying.

  Je pleure.

  “Abby, are you listening to me?”

  I nod, still facing the window, away from Zeke. In the reflection I can see that his head is down, that he’s shaking it back and forth. I should ask if everything is okay, si tout va bien, but words will make it obvious that I’m crying.

  Someone in the room.

  “Sorry about that,” he starts, and his hands pull his hair back.

  I need to pull myself together because I’m clearly overreacting. I know I’m not just someone in the room to Zeke. Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I try to get my emotions under control.

  “I’m sorry I answered the phone—”

  “Is everything okay?” I work very hard to keep my voice even and happy, and by some miracle, it works.

  “It’s fine,” Zeke says, and I know he’s lying. Because there was nothing fine about the tone of his voice when he took the call, with the fact that he walked ou
tside to talk, with the way he looks at me right now. Nothing at all.

  And as much as I’ve schooled my features, as much as I’ve calmed myself down in the ten minutes he’s been gone, my anger reignites, takes root. I want to yell. I want to scream, Am I really just someone in the room? I want to tell him how sick and tired I am of all these damn trips to Boston, of all the things he’s not telling me, of the fact that I clearly like him way too much for a summer fling, for a relationship that will end with the end of this summer program.

  But that means opening up a can of worms that terrifies me. And plus, even through the reflection in the glass, I can tell that he’s worn out, that he’s barely holding it together. “Come here,” I say, turning to face him. I get out of my chair and pull him toward me. “I think we’ve watched enough of the movie to ensure we can talk about it in an educated way if asked. Let’s just relax for a bit. Listen to some music.”

  And Zeke lets me pull him back to my bed, and we both pretend that everything is okay, that he’s not miserable, that I’m not aware that there are important things I don’t know about. Sometime during the night, he leaves, and only when I wake to an empty bed do I let myself wonder which Zeke I’ll see tomorrow.

  Except the answer is No Zeke. He leaves me a text that says he had to take a last-minute trip to Boston, that he’s already sent a message to Marianne. That he’s sorry. That he’ll find me later, before dinner.

  And at dinner, he’s fun, affectionate Zeke. We sit with Alice and Colin, and Zeke smiles and jokes and his fingers hold mine under the table. At one point, he stands on his chair to do a dramatic reading of “Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast,” an English poem about a man who banishes a ghost from his castle. And while my stomach hurts from laughing so hard and my heart feels full, there’s also an odd emptiness around us.

  Our last week in French class before the trip to Montreal is one winning day after another. We speak French from early in the morning when Zeke meets me in front of my door, all through breakfast and class, and even during our breaks. I’m giggling like a schoolgirl all the time, and Drew is all scowly but Marianne smiles, and we ace our tests and our assignments.

  And Marianne agrees to write me a glowing recommendation for the Paris School, and I’m so excited when I get out of the building that I yell out a primal scream to the sky, my whole body alive with joy.

  Zeke has only gone to Boston twice and each time he’s come back when he was supposed to. I’ve taken to asking him about his physio appointments, and he answers them with a smile or a grimace, depending on the day. Once I even asked if I could come with him, hang out in the doctor’s office while he had his appointment; maybe we could even walk around Boston for a few hours, speaking in French, bien sûr. And even though it didn’t work out, because of timing and rules and permissions and such, it’s okay.

  Because we walk through Merritt instead, fingers intertwined, and we sit in the park, and we kiss by the lake; every word we speak is in French.

  I’m living in French.

  I’m dreaming in French.

  C’est merveilleux.

  It’s marvelous.

  TWENTY

  THE BUS RIDE TO MONTREAL is long and cramped. Zeke and I snuggle in our seats together, my legs resting for a while across his lap, our light jackets blanketing us.

  Fingers intertwined, mouths pressed together, giggling, making out, whispering. It’s a good thing we’re in the last row. I don’t even notice the smell of the bathroom; I’m just glad there are no children around.

  “Arrête,” Zeke whispers. My hand has slipped under his shirt, partially hidden under our jackets but not really.

  “J’aime ton torse.” I rub up his stomach to his chest, and he struggles to stay still. “Tu es chatouilleux?”

  Favorite new word. Ticklish. Chatouilleux. Zeke est vraiment chatouilleux. Zeke is very ticklish.

  Zeke giggles. He freaking giggles and it makes me want to straddle him. It makes me want to be someone I’ve never been, someone I never thought I’d want to be.

  “We’re approaching Montreal,” the bus driver interrupts. “Nous sommes presque à Montreal.”

  We spend the day touring Montreal with Marianne and the rest of our classmates. But this tour is less about the architecture and the sites. It’s about daily life in a French city, speaking to the salespeople when we buy postcards, ordering at the local deli, picking up copies of La Presse and discussing them over café and pain au chocolat. And if there exists an idea of perfection, a moment where I’m exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to be doing, it’s here and now. Walking through the streets of Montreal in the summer, my fingers intertwined with Zeke’s, a lemonade in my free hand, the sounds of French conversations all around us, the presence of French words wherever I look. It’s almost as though someone has taken all the desires I have, even the ones I’m afraid to admit to myself, and given them all to me in one stunning day.

  There is not one place in my body where I feel the dislocation of not belonging, not being in the right family, not having the right interests. I’m in a moment built out of all of my fantasies and it makes me deliriously happy.

  We sit down to an early dinner at seven, a long table filled with all the students in our class and Marianne and her friend Louise at one end, Zeke and I beside them. Louise is a professor at the University of Montreal, and she and Zeke get lost in a long conversation about places they’ve visited in Paris. I’m distracted from what Marianne is saying by the flow of Zeke’s hands as he speaks.

  I think about what it feels like to have those hands on my skin, and there’s a part of me that wants us to feign illness and excuse ourselves, to give us a few hours alone in the hotel before everyone retires to their rooms.

  “Abby?”

  I’m startled out of my reverie by Marianne’s elevated voice. “Le serveur t’a demandé si tu veux quelque chose à boire.”

  I glance up to see an older gentleman with an amused look on his face. Clearly he was doing a better job reading the lust on my face.

  “De l’eau, s’il vous plaît,” I murmur, because water is the only word I can think of, and before I can apologize to Marianne for spacing out while she was speaking, before I can take a moment to look at the menu, Zeke’s hand finds mine under the table.

  And from the way he grips it, I know that he completely knows how I feel right now.

  And that he feels the same way.

  I don’t pay attention to the movie we’re watching with the class. And not just because Zeke’s hand is stroking mine.

  But because as we walked into the theater, Julie, my roommate for tonight, told me I had the hotel room to myself. That she’d be off hanging out with some guys she met at the park. That so long as neither of us mentioned it to Marianne, nobody would know.

  A hotel room.

  Nobody would know.

  The idea both makes me want to vomit and drag Zeke out of here as quickly as I can. We can read the recap of this movie online. We can cheat. We can do whatever we need to do because there’s a hotel room less than a mile away that is empty. A hotel room with a bed.

  “I’ll be right back,” I whisper, dislodging my hand from Zeke’s.

  “Everything okay?” Tout va bien? he asks; our natural language is French now. English would be awkward. English would be ordinary. Even after we’ve finished our hours of directed conversation, filled in our journals of notes, we continue in French.

  Because French is the language of us.

  “Un moment,” I murmur. Only one minute.

  And he squeezes my hand for a split second, like he knows I’m temporarily fleeing. His hand says: let’s go.

  It takes three tries for Alice to pick up. “Hello?” she asks, her voice heavy with sleep.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, the English words awkward in my mouth now. For hours I’ve been thinking nonstop in French; French are the first words that come to my brain.

  “Just—” she says, a huge y
awn interrupting her words, “just tired. I had a headache so I took a pill. But I’m okay.”

  I hear the familiar sounds of Alice drinking from her water bottle. I can picture her in bed, in our empty room. I picture her pulling herself up, flicking on the light.

  “Did you go out? Did something happen?”

  There’s a little chuckle on the line. “No, Mom, it was just a regular headache. I think I spent too long outside and didn’t drink enough water. Just your average moment of dehydration.”

  Water. De l’eau. I remember Zeke’s hands finding mine under the table after I embarrassed myself at dinner, the shots of electricity.

  “I’m falling for Zeke,” I whisper, as though the quieter the words, the less of a chance I’ll need to take responsibility for them.

  There’s a small pause and for a moment I wonder if maybe I was too quiet, if Alice didn’t hear, if—

  “Why does that scare you?”

  “I’ve never felt this way before,” I croak out. But the truth is, it’s not that at all.

  It’s—

  “He’s a good guy.” I can hear the buried yawn in Alice’s words. I should let her go back to sleep. I should walk back into the movie theater, slip my hand back into Zeke’s, tell myself that I can take this one step at a time. There’s no rush.

  But there’s an empty hotel room less than a mile away. A room. And a bed. And those shots of electricity. And the possibility of—

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know, babe,” Alice says. “It’s scary to trust your heart to someone else.”

  “What if he ends up hurting me?”

  There’s a gulp on the other end of the line and a faint tap, and I know she’s reached the end of her bottle. “Then you’ll discover that you’re stronger than you think. Because I know you are. I’m not going to lie and tell you he won’t hurt you, because I don’t know that. But I can tell you that whatever happens between you guys, you will get through it because you’re so strong. You’ve been strong enough all these years to go after the thing you love most, to forge your own path even though it’s different from your family’s. It’s likely Zeke will one day do something to hurt you, as much as he might not want to. Things happen, and we deal. But by not embracing this, you’re the one who’s really hurting yourself. You’re doing it by telling yourself that you won’t survive whatever comes next. And I know you can do it. You’ll make it through.”