by S. J. Sylvis
The second he sees Rowen scoot away from him, he stands up and sprints to his car. He screams, “You and your boyfriend are CRAZY!” I laugh out loud as he barrels into his Camaro and squeals down the road so fast that he ignores the stop sign. Once he is out of sight, I plop down on the ground, beside Rowen. I can hear his rapid breathing in an attempt to calm himself down. I just watched an entirely different Rowen come to life: one full of rage and fury.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but it comes out like a ghost’s whisper. I crouch in-between his perched-up legs, feeling the sidewalk scrape at my knees, and bring his face to mine. The second I do, my heart crumbles. Emotions are etched all over his formed face. His eyes are filled with tears, and his full bottom lip is trembling. It’s so bizarre seeing such a strong-bodied man like Rowen look so incredibly defeated.
We stare at each other’s faces until I see the tears spilling from his eyes. Without hesitation, I crush his head against my body, letting him fall apart in my arms. Blindsided by this, I have to choke back my own sob.
He rambles, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I saw him and a look of fear in your eyes and I was back in that moment with the robber… ” He pauses and I sit back on my legs, “I, I should have saved you two years ago.” I gulp so loudly that the birds flying high above us probably heard it.
“Rowen, stop feeling guilty for that. I’ve told you before, there was nothing you could have done to stop what happened.”
In between sniffles, he looks up at me and takes in my expression. His face is tear-stained, and in that moment, I realize just how hurt the both of us are over what happened. There’s just so much pain intertwined in the two of us that I picture wicked, thorn infested vines sprouting from the ground, wrapping their lengthy arms around the pair of us. Neither of us want to move, and I suddenly have the urge to kiss away every tear spilling down his face. I want the entire past to be erased, I want to start over in this very moment.
“How do you expect me to fully forgive you, if you can’t forgive yourself?”
He takes a few minutes to answer, voice rough and scratchy. “I don’t know… I really don’t know.”
We stay wrapped in each other’s arms on our little concrete pad for what seems like hours until he gets the nerve to stand up to wipe the blood off his knuckles. My heart is out-of-control in my chest as I stand and stare at his body, his shirt taut around his back, his jeans hugging every curve. My heart is slowly losing its battle between it and my mind.
“I think we need to talk… ” I say, and he turns around looking overcome. He nods his head in agreement.
He opens his mouth, not meeting my face. “Tomorrow, after work. We’ll go somewhere and talk.” I listen to his feet scraping the concrete as he walks down to his truck. I watch him back all the way out of my driveway before I bow my head and let the emotional roller coaster take off.
Eighteen
The smell of a fresh summer rain fills my nose as I climb out of my car, rounding the back side to get to Rowen’s parked truck. He’s parked it to the very brim of Old Man Henry’s tallest hill, sitting on the bed, with his bare legs dangling. He doesn’t meet my presence as I climb up, but I’m fully aware that our knees mere inches apart.
For a while, we both just stare out at the landscape. Green, grassy hills flow on top of one another for miles and miles. I can tell they’ve just been mowed because their grassy shreds are still freshly laid out upon green floor—the smell of grass floats in the air and if I concentrate hard enough, I can almost smell the nightly moon, too. The sun has just barely set and the stars are soon to be approaching, casting that perfect picture-worthy, romantic light over our bodies. Being out here brings back a wave of nostalgia. This is Rowen’s and my spot; the first time he kissed me, we were here. The first time we had sex, where I lost my virginity, it was out here in his truck bed, the stars being our only witness. This is where everything started. This is where I fell in love with him.
“So… ” he says, interrupting the symphony of crickets in the distance.
“So… ” I say back, unable to really form words. I know I need to lay everything out in the open and that we need to come to some sort of a conclusion, but now that I’m here, I’m at a loss.
“Sorry about yesterday… I just lost it.” I can see out of the corner of my eye that he has his head bent low, like he’s ashamed. “I saw you there, vulnerable again, and I just acted.”
I nod my head in understanding. I get it. “I understand. It seems that the attack didn’t just affect me. I sometimes forget that you were there, too.” Guilt seems to be filling my mind more and more these days.
“I think our breakup affected me more than the actual attack, and that’s all on me. It’s my fault.”
“Rowen,” I say, and he turns his head and looks at me. “Being your friend kind of sucks.”
For a moment, his eyebrows dip and then he grins, and I let out an audible laugh, which he soon follows. “Back at ya, sport.” We laugh a little longer and I’m thankful for the lightness in this moment. It’s refreshing from how it normally feels, like we’re trapped in this dark subdued place, all the time. It’s like, give me a damn flashlight!
“It’s not working. At least it isn’t for me.” I murmur, looking back out at all the expanding hills.
“So then, what do we do?”
I don’t say anything for a while, trying to collect my thoughts and calm down my erratic breathing. The thought of this being our last conversation, this being our goodbye, makes me want to reach over and cling to him for dear life… and that urge does nothing but scare me. My heart is too invested in him to make any decisions… this woodsy scent eloping with my senses, his rough voice filling my ears, his knee brushing against mine… it’s too much. So, I do the only thing I can think of.
“I have a proposition for you.” My heart soars, as my mind balks.
“Are you using my own tactics on me?” He lets out a chuckle and I swear I can feel it inside my chest.
“I think we take the year, to figure out what we want. I need to get myself together. I… I don’t know what I want. But being friends with you is just too much.”
He takes a second to take in the landscape, which gives me a perfect excuse to study his strong profile. “So, what you’re saying is that it’s all or nothing?” Our faces meet and the shadowed crevices give nothing away.
“Yes,” I breathe. “It’s either we try this thing between us again, or we’re done.”
“I already know what I want,” he says in a husky voice as he adjusts the hat that’s perched perfectly on the back of his head. “I want you. All of you. So, the chess pieces are in your hands.”
I swallow loudly, squeezing my eyes shut and clenching my jaw. What am I doing?! My mouth opens, propelling words faster than my mind and stop me. “Well, if I decide I want to try us again, then I’ll come back to the Club… again. If I don’t, then I’ll find something else and put the necessary distance between us.” Because, distance is exactly what I’ll need if I decide I can’t be with him. If I can’t get my heart and mind to come to an agreeance, I’m going to need about fifteen hundred football fields separating us. Right now, it feels as if I’m at an impasse.
He says nothing, but slowly nods his head. Then he peeks up at me, the moon casting a flawless glow on his face, emphasizing those devious shadows along all the right places. I feel my hand twitch to touch him. “So, no communication, right? Just like last year?”
“Exactly,” I answer. I won’t be able to make a decision if I talk to him. I’ll be swayed by his voice, his presence. I just know it. He might as well be a damn vampire.
For a while, we just sit on the bed of his truck. Staring at the distance, lost in our own thoughts. I glance up and watch the stars twinkle in the sky and a state of calmness washes over me. It feels so right to be here, under these same stars with him. How can something that feels so right, be so wrong?
“Ya know… ” he starts, as he looks over at m
e and then back at the midnight sky. “It’s like the stars have realigned, just for us.” My eyes saunter toward him and then back to the sparkle above. If I look closely enough, they really have…
“I feel like we have bad luck,” I whisper, still staring at the sky.
“There’s no such thing.” He leans back on his hands. “There’s just… luck. It’s all about how you look at it.”
My expression stays the same, wondering what he means, and he starts up again. “Think of the attack. You could look at it as bad luck, but you could also look at it as good luck. It turned you into a badass, strong-willed girl. I think that’s a good thing.”
I take in his profile again, not caring if he catches me. I take in the entirety of his face. Everything so perfectly placed. His cheek bones prominent like his jaw. A perfectly straight nose that leads down to luscious lips. I watch as he brings his head down from the sky and turns towards me. “Samantha being a devious, lying bitch… that could be considered bad luck, but you could also look at is as good luck; now you know what a real friend is like. There’s always two parts to everything. Just like with luck.”
“Are there two parts to what happened with us?” I counter, barely audible. I bite my lip while waiting for his answer. His eyes dip down to my lips and back up to my eyes.
“Yeah, it’s not bad luck. It just made us both realize that what we had was real.” My heart blooms at his words but my mind has her fists up, ready to guard. What an interesting thing to leave me with all year to dissect.
For the next hour, we sit back and talk like old friends. Reminiscing over the memories, our friends, all the things we did together before everything went to hell. It all feels so familiar and so comforting to be in this place with him again. Away from all the hurt and emotions usually swarming the two of us; it almost makes me regret setting up this proposition because suddenly, being away from him for the entire school year feels like getting a swift kick to the gut.
“We should probably go. Old Man Henry’s gonna come out here with a shotgun soon.” I crack up at his words. That happened one time, when Rowen and I were out here for hours. Literally hours. We had sex (a couple of times, to be honest), danced to the staticky country music pouring out of his crappy truck speakers. Then we laid in the grass, holding hands. It was probably one of the best nights of my life, until Old Man Henry came out with a shotgun, threatening to shoot us “kids.” Rowen and I jumped into his truck, laughing uncontrollably and he sped down the dirt road as fast as he could. Dust was flying everywhere, but in the distance I could see a determined overweight man with a shotgun perched on his shoulder.
I laugh. “You’re right. Let’s go.” The goodbye is looming in the air and my laughing stops within seconds. I hop down from his truck, brushing the debris from my bare legs. He jumps down beside me, landing softly in the grass, and I cannot breathe. Not a single breath is leaving my body. We’re only standing a few feet apart, and I watch as his chest rises and falls unsteadily.
“Bye, Rowen,” I whisper, quickly turning around and forcing my heavy feet in the direction of my parked car. Before I get another foot away from him, his hand grabs mine from behind. I freeze in my spot, allowing the grass to tickle my ankles. I take a deep breath as he sharply pulls me back into his presence. For a second, it sounds like the crickets have ceased chirping, the cicadas stopped humming in the hollows of the trees… it’s as if the stars really have realigned, just for us. In this moment, the world is quiet. Just Rowen and I.
He takes his hands and grabs the sides of my head, bringing us face-to-face. I feel the patchy calluses on his hands, more than likely from the gym, as they scratch my high cheek bones. His fingers intertwine in my chlorine-scented waves as he tips my face up to the point that I can feel his breath on my nose. “I need you to know,” he whispers, lips so close that I can almost feel their softness. “That I want you, Sadie. So. Fucking. Bad.” My eyes widen, as I feel my lips moving even closer to his. Just one more centimeter, and they’ll be on mine. This will all be over. I want him to kiss me. I want to feel his lips brush against mine, I want to feel the hunger that I see in his brown depths. I want him to make the world stop spinning on its very axis. I close my eyes, imagining what would happen if I just did it. If I just leaned in a fraction of a second and pressed my lips against his. Would the world cease to exist? Would I cease to exist? Would it erase every single tear in my heart?
“I want you… and I usually get what I want.” His voice is pure sex, husky and strained, making me tremble all over. Standing this close, breathing his air, has my chest rising faster than it ever has before. Rowen tensely backs away from me, unwrapping his tangled fingers. I hear the ground crushing under his feet as treads around to his truck. I stay put, only a few feet from the bed. My body jumps to the sound of his truck door rattling. The engine revs up, making the grass floor shake beneath my legs. I watch as his headlights fade away under the expanding hills, and I finally let out a breath that I wasn’t aware I was holding. I consciously reach up and place my warm fingers on my mouth, rubbing my lips back and forth, painfully slow. I want to know what it feels like to have his skillful lips on mine again. I want to hear that husky, throaty voice groan as we connect once more. I want his mouth on every single part of my body, giving me that tingly feeling on my most intimate parts. I want it all. I want him. I want him back.
Part Three
Summer, 2012
Nineteen
I’m almost positive that every other twenty-year old knows how to use social media, everyone but ME! Did you really think that I could go the entire school year without checking in on Rowen? I tried. I tried my hardest to just simply put him out of my mind. I dated. I even got naked with a guy, but there was Rowen… right there in the back of my mind with his smoldering gaze, backwards hat, and perfectly long lashes covering those deep brown eyes. Ugh.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, when I’d reached my limit, I very deviously used Alicia’s profile (she really shouldn’t leave it open on her computer) and tried to search for Rowen. I got flustered after about three seconds and ended up rebooting her computer… oops. So, here I am. A year later and I haven’t even gotten a tiny sliver of intel on Rowen, other than fishing information out of Kyle (very innocently, I might add.).
“Alicia, hurry the hell up!” I squeeze my head out from my car window. She briefly puts her own head out of our miniscule, crappy, bottom-floor apartment and flips me the bird. I laugh under my breath. Alicia is literally late for everything. Class? She’s late. Lunch date? Late. A frat party? She shows up two hours after she said she’d be there. She’s relentless when it comes to not being on time. It drives me absolutely up-the-wall, considering I’m early for everything, almost annoyingly early.
I think Alicia and I are the last ones on campus. It’s sparse. Barely any cars parked in the student parking lot, no professors walking around carelessly with their heads buried in their phones, nothing. Just me waiting on Alicia. I was halfway home when she called me, asking to stay the night at my house. She was just going to stay in the empty apartment for the night, then her mom was going to pick her up in the morning, but the one thing I truly know about Alicia is that she hates to be alone so I turned my tiny Ford around and came back to get her.
A few weeks ago, Alicia’s car blew up, literally. I was with her, so that was fun. We were on our way home from getting Chinese off-campus at this little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that sells fake purses on the side, when all of a sudden, I noticed smoke pouring from below the hood of her car. She pulled over, gravel crunching beneath her tires, and we barreled out of our seats (still clutching the Chinese food, of course). The second we got out of the car, it caught fire. I guess she didn’t realize that you had to actually put oil in your car to make it go, so there’s that. She blames it on the fact that she doesn’t have a father figure in her life … she said, “Aren’t dads supposed to do these things for you? I don’t have one.” The tow truck driver rolled his wrin
kled eyes at her, then smiled; he had some type of tobacco sticking in his teeth, and his longing stare at Alicia’s model-like olive-colored bare legs was enough to have me call one of our other friends to come pick us and our Chinese up on the side of the road.
“Come help me!” I hear Alicia say from the doorway. She has three pink crates in her arms that are piled up higher than her head, blocking her face, and she has three bags strapped around her body.
“Oh my God. You’re a mess,” I say, through a fit of laughter as I skip up to her full hands and help her load the car.
Halfway down the highway, she finally turns down our mini ACDC concert and says, “I’m literally so excited to stay at your house. It’s like we’re having a slumber party.”
“We have a slumber party every night. We live together,” I counter, keeping my eyes on the fast cars zipping around us.
“I know, but this is different. I get to hang at your childhood home; I get to see where you grew up. And… ” She trails off, bringing her hand up to her chin and tapping it repeatedly. “And maybe I get to see Rowen.”
I almost bring the car to a slamming stop, my foot teetering over the brake. “There is no way you’re seeing Rowen tonight. I haven’t even see him, or told him… ” I waiver from the last part because I’m still feeling all wonky from my decision. She pouts, so I add, “You should come back for our friend, Kyle’s, annual 4th of July party. That way you can meet everyone.”
She nods her head in an excited manner, smiling from ear to ear. She turns the music back up and leaves me to my thoughts of Rowen.