by Amelia Betts
“Stop it.”
From the front stoop, Mimi ushered us inside, looking more Martha Stewart than Madame Zelda in her white capri pants and pink sweater set. We were directed to sit in her living room while she retrieved sweet teas for the three of us.
Isabella nudged me as we sat side by side on the couch and I noticed the wicked smirk on her face as she studied its peony-patterned upholstery. “It looks like a florist’s shop exploded in here.”
“Be nice!” I said, unable to stop myself from smiling at her snarky humor.
When she came back in and deposited our drinks on the coffee table, Mimi dragged a side chair up to Isabella’s end of the couch and took a seat. “Do you mind if I take your hand for a moment?” she asked in a sweet, Southern lilt.
Feigning indifference, Isabella offered her right hand and the psychic set about with her reading. Not surprisingly, it was hardly any time before my friend had been won over by Sasha’s soothsayer, and I was satisfied that my present was well chosen.
“You’re going to have one last great love,” Mimi announced midway through the session, after she’d brought out the tarot cards. “He’s around you already. In your neighborhood.”
“One of those old geezers? I don’t think so.” Isabella shook her head, disturbed. She came around, though, once Mimi identified the man as a younger “visitor” of the neighborhood, not an actual resident. Then Isabella happily jumped to the conclusion that her destined affair was with the Latino pool boy she’d been admiring from afar during her weekly water aerobics class. Mimi didn’t seem so convinced of the pool boy theory, but Isabella was dead set on it.
“What about you?” Mimi glanced over at me at the end of the hour. “No reading for you today?”
I shook my head and smiled politely, thinking she was crazy to assume I had more than $100 lying around.
“Well, I can tell you’re in love, anyway. I could see that the moment you stepped out of the car.”
“No, I’m not, actually. Free and clear of all romantic entanglements, and feeling good about it.” I smiled, hoping to convince both Mimi and myself. The “feeling good about it” part wasn’t the most honest thing I’d ever said, but I was in fake-it-till-you-make-it mode.
Mimi cocked her head to one side and reached for my hand. When I didn’t immediately offer it, Isabella picked it up from my lap and handed it over. Closing her eyes, Mimi clasped my hand between hers. “Ah… okay, I see. You’ve had a little heartache. But maybe something you didn’t see as love actually was.”
“Right.” I rolled my eyes up to the pale pink ceiling, certain she was wrong.
“Who knows?” Isabella chimed in.
“I’m just warning you, I’m usually right about the love thing,” Mimi said.
“The proof is in the pudding. If I get this pool boy, I’m calling you again.” Isabella wagged a finger at Mimi, who chuckled and took a healthy swig of her iced tea.
Later, Isabella would speculate that the tea was drugged, because by the end of it, she had started to believe everything the woman said. I, on the other hand, felt pretty confident her speculations were wrong. After all, I was as far away from “in love” as I had ever been and almost certain that was a good thing.
* * *
When classes started back up, I had the inevitable run-in with Julien every once in a while, and thankfully our conversations got less and less awkward every time. I had officially come around to his logic about why he and I would never work, especially after I’d seen him eating lunch at the Plex with the woman he’d been dating. She was tall with the striking combination of straight, long, black hair and freckled, honey-toned skin. She seemed shy and quirky, and they fit together in a way that he and I never did. They were comfortable, a little boring perhaps. I envisioned them having this same lunch in a park in New York, and that made even more sense—a lively, urban backdrop for the staid couple of professors. At some point, Julien had appeared to catch me staring out of the corner of his eye, and like a spaz, I had snuck behind a tree, then run in the opposite direction.
Later that week, I saw him on his way to the Carver Lecture Hall, and he told me Cecile missed me and had been talking about me like I was an old, estranged confidant. I was surprised to hear it but flattered, and I promised to come watch one of her basketball games once the season started. It was a terribly normal, mature exchange, and I silently congratulated myself as we parted ways, knowing I had come a long way since stumbling out of his office in tears and into the arms of Professor Donna Dixon, a woman I’d never met before and had, mercifully, never seen again.
* * *
In my program, there were nine other students—four guys and five girls—and I was relieved to be the only one who had been at Reid for undergrad as well. Not only was I more comfortable from the get-go, but I also became the de facto Oceanside expert, arranging little outings here and there for the other students who had come from everywhere but Florida. Hearing this, Gracie had accused me of suddenly morphing into a social butterfly and complained she wasn’t there to witness it. About a month into fall semester, my classmates and I decided to celebrate the end of our first big assignment by throwing a bonfire on the beach, something I hadn’t done since freshman year.
“Look at these stars!” the Italian girl, Camilla, kept saying as she stood by the fire gazing upward, her marshmallow slowly petrifying on the end of the stick that dangled from her grip.
“What, they don’t have stars like this in Italy?” I asked.
“Well, of course,” she responded in her heavy, singsong accent. “They’re better there, but I had low expectations for this place.”
Inspired by Camilla’s enthusiasm, we all took a moment, rolling our heads back to stare at the dark, silver-specked canvas above us. I couldn’t remember feeling so content.
Then Rebecca, the easily distracted flirt from Mississippi, cried out, “Whoa, incoming!” and we all looked in the direction she was staring. Down the beach, an attractive male figure walked alongside the ocean, headed toward us.
“Wait—I know him,” I said.
“From your dreams?” Rebecca replied with a chuckle.
“No, really.” In a kind of daze, I dropped my marshmallow stick in the sand and made my way toward Liam at the water’s edge. I couldn’t ignore him this time.
“Bring him back here!” Rebecca called after me, sounding like she was only half kidding.
Liam recognized me as I approached—I could tell by his grin, a little nervous seeming. He pushed his hands inside his jeans pockets.
“Hey,” I said, feeling my cheeks go red. Whether I liked it or not, he still had that effect on me.
“Hey.” Liam kicked at the sand and glanced at me with a familiar twinkle in his eye. “I thought that was you. I was thinking about coming up, but I didn’t know if you’d want to see me.”
“You look really good,” I said. And he did, just like he had onstage. His face was a little fuller even. He looked well rested, perhaps a few pounds heavier overall.
“Thanks. I’ve been staying healthy, working out, all the boring stuff. What about you? You look amazing.”
I blushed. Liam’s compliment was the best thing I’d heard in weeks, and it made me suddenly forget all the heartache he’d caused. In fact, standing there on the beach with him, our little fling felt like ancient history. “I’m sorry about that text I sent. I was just trying to focus on me,” I said.
“Please, you don’t have to explain anything. I just wanted to reach out. I didn’t expect anything.” Liam kicked at the sand again. He seemed awkward and human, and I remembered how emotionally raw he had been the last time I saw him.
“Hey, do you wanna join us?” I asked. “I’m just here with a bunch of other students in my program. Nutrition geeks. They’ll love that you’re a chef.”
“I don’t know…” He glanced back at the ocean, leading me to think, for a split second, that he might turn me down. “You got marshmallows over there?”
>
“You bet,” I said, and held out my hand.
And then, like it was the most natural thing in the world, Liam took my hand and I led him back to the bonfire, where my new friends greeted him like he had just been named People’s Sexiest Man Alive.
Ever the extrovert, Rebecca put words to what everyone was thinking. “I’m sorry, but I have never seen anyone as good-looking as you IRL. Do you actually exist?” She reached out to touch him, and Liam played along like a good sport.
“Last time I checked. What’s your name again?”
“Rebecca.”
“Hi, Rebecca.” He reached out to shake her hand and she pretended to faint.
“Forget it. He’s Australian, right?” Camilla looked at Liam with an impish smile, and he nodded. “Never go to bed with an Australian man, Rebecca. They’re brutes!”
“Oh right, because Italian men are soooo gentle,” Rebecca countered, valiantly coming to Liam’s defense.
I watched with amusement as the girls vied for Liam’s attention and the guys ruffled at his presence. The old me would have been jealous, but now I was just entertained—proud, even. Eventually, the group normalized and one of the boys, Marcus, suggested we play a game called “Puppetmaster,” which entailed inventing our own trivia questions and inflicting them on the group. The result was pretty hilarious, especially when the questions became more and more subjective and we were forced to answer things like: “What time did I wake up this morning?” or “Which world leader is the healthiest eater?” The game lasted until the marshmallows had run out and we finally declared the night over. Even then, nobody really wanted to go home.
When the last of the fire had been extinguished, Liam walked with me to the dark and desolate-looking parking lot and glanced around. “I don’t see your car,” he said.
“No, I rode with Camilla.” I nodded toward her old VW and she waved, waiting patiently for us to say our goodbyes.
“Let me walk you home.” Liam smiled and nudged my arm with his elbow. “What do you say?”
“What do I say? Hmm…” My instinct was to say yes, of course, but I was working on my impulsive tendencies. For some reason, I had kind of assumed we would part ways after the bonfire, like a couple of old lovers who were resigned to never see each other again. “Are you sure?” I finally asked. “I mean, I don’t know what your situation is, but I don’t want it to become some temptation. That’s not to say I’m not assuming we would… I’m just remembering the last time—”
He stopped me, amused at my fumbling. “No, it’s fine, I promise. Let me walk you, Mischa.”
I smiled and scrunched up my nose, trying to fight the giddiness that threatened to overtake me. “Wait one second.” I held up an index finger as I broke away from him.
At Camilla’s car I informed her, very self-consciously, that I’d be walking home with my old friend. In turn, she teasingly warned me again about Australian men, but I promised I wouldn’t fall prey to his brutish charms.
“Yeah, yeah, you guys have already slept together.”
My jaw dropped. “How are you so sure?”
“Are you kidding me? The way he looks at you. With the eyes of a dog,” she said.
I laughed at Camilla’s odd choice of metaphor. It reminded me of one of Isabella’s lost-in-translation moments.
She threw her car door open and slipped inside. “It’s the truth!” she called out as she rolled down the window, waving goodbye.
I waved back and walked over to where Liam was waiting for me. I hadn’t stopped giggling over Camilla’s comment.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Camilla said you look at me ‘with the eyes of a dog.’”
Smiling, he held out his arm and I took it. “Well I’m more polite than a dog, at least give me that.”
We started to leave the parking lot headed in the wrong direction, but I corrected our path, explaining that I had moved. “We’re actually closer to my new place than Julien’s,” I said, veering him in the right direction.
“So did you ever get off with that professor, then?” Liam tugged at my arm.
“Excuse me?” I glanced sideways at him, incredulous.
“I figured that was inevitable, no?”
“Why would you think that?” I was trying to act coy, but he had caught me off guard.
“Uh… maybe because he looked at you with the eyes of a dog? I dunno.”
“Ha-ha, good one.”
“So are you gonna answer me?”
I shook my head, smiling, knowing it would do neither of us any good to talk about Julien. Besides, I was too caught up in how invigorating it felt to walk with him like this, arm in arm. When I’d found him on the beach, he had immediately seemed like such a different person than the one I had met outside the Baptist church that fated night, so much more calm and vulnerable. “You’ve changed,” I remarked.
“So have you,” he said, drawing my arm in closer to his body.
As we moved inland, the air got balmier. I had been chilly at the beach, but now it felt like the perfect temperature outside. Passing through a strip mall parking lot, I gave Liam the short update on my life—how I’d started school and was selling my juice cleanse at Sasha’s spa and how I was cat sitting for a math professor through the end of the year. He told me about the menu changes at his restaurant and said his band had licensed their song for a British car commercial, and he hadn’t had another drink since that night I had come to his house. At some point, he lowered his arm and took my hand in his, and I felt a rush of emotions that I’d been trying to hold back.
“I thought I would never see you again,” I confessed as we turned a corner onto a lamp-lit street lined with beautiful cypress trees. “I mean, not see you, see you. Actually, I did see you. That night you played at Gator Gras.”
“Seriously?” Liam stopped in his tracks. “You were there?”
I nodded. “You were amazing. I should have stayed and told you that. I just… I guess I panicked, seeing you.” I looked over at him. He shook his head, baffled, his eyes on the street ahead of us.
“I thought you might be there. I had this sense. There was this one song—I wasn’t gonna play it, but I’d written it for you and I figured, if you heard it, you might forgive me.” He laughed, his smile turning to a grimace. “Silly romantic idea, huh?”
“I did hear it,” I said, knowing that the song he was talking about was the exact one I had heard. “It stayed in my head for days, Liam. It was beautiful.”
He smiled and looked over at me, his eyes twinkling again. He tugged my arm and we started to walk. “The way I acted that last night you saw me was embarrassing. I wanted to reach out, even before I sent the text, but I had no idea what to say or how to say it. I missed you, but at the same time, I was in such a miserable place. I wish I could say that night was my rock bottom, but a couple years back I was even worse… if you can imagine.” He chuckled. There was an anxiousness to his laugh. “I need to tell you something, though. I want to say that I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I rushed to answer.
“No, it’s not. I dragged you into my shit and yelled at you for no reason. I hardly remember that night. I’m sure I don’t even know the worst of it.”
“I think the guitars got the worst of it,” I joked.
Liam laced his fingers through mine, gripping my hand a little tighter. “I like you, Mischa.”
“I like you, too… I think.”
“You think?”
“I know.” I leaned into him playfully, and he nudged me with his hip. “But where does that get us?”
“It gets us here, obviously,” he said with a cryptic wink. “You know… I’ve told you things I never told anybody else.”
“Ditto,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze. It was a nice feeling, walking and talking like this after everything that had transpired between us, but suddenly the fear struck me that I knew where this conversation was going. “I don’t think I can be your frie
nd, Liam, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He glanced at me sideways, taken aback.
“As much as I’d like to say I could, I don’t think I’d handle it very well.” I gave him my best attempt at a smile and pointed to a street sign one block away. “That’s my street.”
There was a long gap of silence as we kept walking, the sound of our footsteps pattering against the sidewalk in unison. In another block and a half, we reached the house where I was staying and I lamented having to say goodbye. “I’d invite you inside, but there’s three emotionally needy cats in there, and they are not interested in vying with anyone else for my attention.”
“I wouldn’t dream of coming in.”
“Oh,” I said. I pretended not to be hurt, but of course it stung a little to hear it. I still wanted him to want me.
Liam kept walking alongside me all the way to the front steps of the house, where he tapped lightly on my shoulder, and I turned to face him. “Listen, Mischa, I don’t want to be your friend either.”
I nodded, whisking a stray hair away from my face. “It was fun while it lasted, I guess. All two hours of it.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, I want to be something else to you. Something I haven’t tried in a long time.”
I blinked as if I hadn’t heard him correctly. A million sensations rushed through me simultaneously as I stood across from him: exhilaration, happiness, terror, anxiety, even sadness. But the dominant voice inside my head was a hopeful one: Is he saying what I think he’s saying?
“I’m not saying I’ve become a different person,” Liam continued. “I’m still the same fucked up guy you met. But I’m really trying now.” He paused for a breath, exhaling loudly. I couldn’t believe this man could seem so nervous to tell me something. “You know that night at the spa? I felt like I really connected with someone for the first time in a long time, and it scared me to death. I felt like, what good is it when I have nothing to offer this girl? When I’m broken?”
I reached out for his hands and took them in mine. “You’re not broken,” I whispered.