Remembering Us

by Stacey Lynn

  It’s as if the “old clothes” are mocking me for even trying to think they would still fit my skin, or me, the way they used to. The way they did when I tried to pretend to be someone my parents wanted me to be.

  If I’ve learned anything in the last couple of weeks, that reality sinks into my bones and feels truer than anything else I know.

  And now I just need to figure out who I became once I had the freedom to do so.

  In order to do that, I not only need answers from Adam about last night, which embarrasses me and makes my eyes burn all over again just thinking about how he left me alone without any explanation, but I also need answers about everything.

  Who is he? Who am I? What happened to me?

  And I have to get them before something else tears us away from one another.

  I throw on yoga shorts and a baggy t-shirt in search for answers and pain reliever meds for my tequila-induced headache.

  I ignore the shirt on my floor that I threw down last night in order to try to get Adam in my bed.

  Maybe it was too soon.

  Or maybe the thought of looking at and touching my scarred abdomen disgusts him.

  The thought makes me pause at the door. I rest my head against the cool wood and take a deep breath. Is that what that was?

  Do my scars and the thought of touching me now turn him off?

  My legs are shaking, a mixture of dehydration and nerves, and I take another deep breath when I hear voices coming from the kitchen.

  One distinctly Adam.

  The other is female. A girl?

  Looking at my clock I see that it’s already ten in the morning. Not only did I sleep in longer than I usually do, but there’s a girl in my apartment the very night after I was rejected.

  I open the door slowly, not wanting to interrupt the visitor, and trying not to become upset until I know what’s going on.

  Jesus. When did I become such a neurotic, emotional girlfriend who constantly thinks their boyfriend is cheating on her? Why is that always my first assumption when it comes to Adam?

  I blow out a frustrated breath and then I laugh to myself when the girl makes a frustrated growl on her own.

  A growl that can only come from Kelsey.

  I tip-toe down the hall, not meaning to eavesdrop, but wondering why she would be here so early on a day when we don’t have anything planned.

  Her soft but scolding voice makes me freeze in the hallway. I plaster my back against the wall as I hear her clearly punctuated words – a sure sign she’s pissed and trying not to yell.

  “You have to tell her,” she says to Adam. “Everything. She deserves to know everything.”

  Adam lets out a frustrated sigh. “You know why I can’t, Kels. The doctor said any news could shock her and make everything take longer.”

  “It’s already taking too long. She has the right to know.”

  “It’s too soon.” I can hear his anger with her.

  If I could see him, I have no doubt that his hands would be clenched into fists or he’d be grabbing tufts of his hair at the nape of his neck.

  “You tell her,” she growls, “or I will.”

  “It’s none of your business, Kelsey. This is between me and her.”

  Which I take as my cue because I’m beyond upset at hearing this conversation that doesn’t make any sense, but is enough to make all sorts of scary ideas run through my head.

  “Tell me what?”

  I walk around the corner, hands crossed over my chest, and glare at my best friend and my boyfriend.

  Both of whom tell me they love me, but are clearly hiding something that shouldn’t be hidden.

  They turn to me and their mouths drop open.

  No one says anything so I stomp around them and pour myself a cup of coffee. I take my first sip and close my eyes, growing more impatient by the silence.

  Without looking at them, I dig through the cupboards until I find our bottle of pain meds and pop two in my mouth.

  “What is it?” I snap, my eyes darting between both of them.

  They say nothing, but Kelsey looks embarrassed and looks down at her feet. Adam can’t, or won’t, look me in the eyes either. There’s a faint pink color on his cheeks like he’s embarrassed or ashamed of just getting busted for something he shouldn’t have been doing.

  Or maybe he’s embarrassed about leaving me in my room naked and unsatisfied.

  But whatever.

  I can’t take any more of this bullshit. I leave the kitchen, not looking at either of them.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m showered and dressed for a day at Hooka Joe’s wearing the name branding t-shirt and a short denim skirt. I don’t have to be at work, but it gives me an excuse to get out of the apartment and not spend the day suffocating under the tension.

  When I reach the kitchen, Adam is at the table, staring blankly at his hands. Kelsey is gone.

  “It isn’t what you were thinking.”

  I pause and turn to him. He doesn’t raise his head to look at me.

  I make a disgusted grunting sound and press my keys tightly into the palm of my hand. The metal presses into my palm until it stings, but I don’t care.

  “You don’t know what I was thinking.”

  He snorts. I roll my eyes. We’re back to our typical responses to one another. Awesome.

  “I’m not cheating on my best friend with your best friend.”

  My eyes widen. Does he really think I lack that much trust in him?

  “That’s really not it at all, Adam. I just don’t know what to think. And I’d like to know what you two were talking about.”

  He shakes his head, and yet, still doesn’t look at me. “I can’t tell you.”

  I smack my lips together. “Right. Of course not. Heaven forbid someone actually tells me what in the hell is going on around here. You know, it’s just my life we’re talking about, no big deal.”

  He slams his hands down on the table. His full mug of coffee shakes and spills out over the top.

  “Do you have any idea how hard this is for me? I love you and I would die for you. I had to watch you!”

  At my gasp, Adam takes a deep breath, running both hands down his face as if he’s trying to erase a memory.

  My memory … the one thing I want answers to.

  “I sat there with you, waiting, not sure if you’d make it. I was the one who didn’t leave your bed while your parents went on their cruise, and you don’t remember one fucking thing of the good. You sit here, every day, cursing me for my mistakes …” he pauses and inhales a deep breath. I can do nothing except sit, frozen to my seat, with my jaw hanging to the floor. “And there was way more good than shitty, Ames.”

  I jump at the sound of his coffee mug slamming into the porcelain sink. I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter into a million pieces with the force of his throw.

  “God! This just sucks! Don’t you think that I want you to feel how much you love me? Remember how much I love you?

  “And do you know how scared I am … every single fucking day that you won’t? Christ, Ames, we got this place to start a life together …” he waves his finger back and forth between the two of us, pausing to take another breath. “Our life together. You wanted it just as much as me, and every day I wake up now, afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid you’ll pack up and leave, and afraid you’ll never remember all the ways I used to make you smile and laugh. You won’t remember the night we made love in here for the first time before we had furniture. I’m so scared you won’t remember any of it!”

  His chest heaves up and down, in and out, stretching his skull t-shirt. His hair is a complete mess from running his hand furiously through it.

  “I love you, Amy.”

  His voice is low, calmer. I can’t say anything back to him, and I see the pain pierce straight into his heart as I sit here, thinking of what he said: I had to watch you, not sure if you’d make it.

  “I love you more than anything and I began falling in love with y
ou the day I pretended you were smarter than me in Statistics, just so I could find an excuse to be alone with you.”

  Finally, I find my voice. “What do you mean you watched me?”

  Confusion flickers across his eyes and then he frowns. “Did you hear anything I just said? I love you, Amy. Please,” he pleads with me, begs me, “don’t make me relive that day. I can’t.”

  I reach out and touch his hand.

  “But I have to know what happened. Just tell me. I can’t handle all these things that are confusing me. I need you to tell me.”

  He shakes his head, running his hand through his hair, and the other gripping mine even tighter. The tension between us palpable. I can feel it filling the air between us as I try to will him with my eyes to tell me.

  I need the truth.

  “You fell …” He begins, and then his head drops with a shake back and forth. He pulls his hand from mine and turns away from me. “I can’t, Amy. You’ll remember someday, I know it. But don’t ask me to relive it.”

  I have nothing to say.

  We’re both silent for minutes or hours. Maybe it’s only seconds, but the only sound I can hear is the ticking of a clock on the wall that sounds like a giant gong.

  Finally, I ask, “Is that why you wouldn’t touch me last night? Does it have to do with my accident and my scar?”

  His head snaps to mine, hands on his hips, and a frown lines running across his forehead.

  “What? God, no. You think I don’t want that?” he asks, waving toward the direction of my room. “Of course, I do. I just couldn’t do it last night. Not when you were drunk, not when …”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  He pulls his bottom lip into his mouth and scrapes it along his teeth. He stares at the picture on the walls and closes his eyes, breathing heavily.

  “You were the first person to trust me. To see past the shit I threw out for everyone else as an act.”

  “I don’t understand what that means, Adam.”

  His head falls and he takes a seat on the couch, knees spread apart, elbows resting on his knees, and props his head up, running his hands through the back of his hair.

  I sit down on a different couch, watching him, forgetting about last night and my coffee that is cold by now.

  This is important. This is real.

  Whatever he’s struggling with right now will answer so many questions for me.

  Finally, he looks at me.

  “I know when I started hitting on you that you thought the same thing about me as everyone else did. You saw me as a player, someone who didn’t give a shit about anything in life besides partying, hooking up with random girls, and making sure my grades were just good enough to stay on the soccer team.” He rubs the back of his neck with one hand and stares out the window. “You weren’t wrong; no one was. But you were the first person to look past all that and want to know the real me.”

  “Who is … what?” I ask slowly, not wanting to push him too far.

  This is the most Adam has ever opened up to me, and I don’t want to miss a single second of it.

  “I’m no one special, Ames. I’m just the kid from a fucked up family who ran to Colorado, taking the first scholarship that was thrown my way, so I could get away from the hell I lived in.” He shrugs. “That day I saw you on the quad laughing with Tyler? It was the first time I didn’t feel like I was drowning in darkness.”

  He turns to face me and one side of his lips turn up. “I know that sounds cheesy. But that’s how it’s always been whenever I’m around you. You just … erase the darkness in me.”

  Wow. I exhale a shaky breath. I chew on the inside of my bottom lip, overwhelmed with what I just heard.

  “What hell did you come from?”

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

  “Your parents?”

  His nose twitches and his fingers fidget in his lap. I know I’m close to something. Understanding him more.

  “I can’t talk about that now.”

  “Did you ever tell me?”

  He nods and stares out the window with a blank expression. I want to ask him what he’s thinking about. The time he told me, or the hell he lived in?

  “Will you ever tell me again?” I ask so softly I’m not sure he heard me.

  “Yeah,” he says slowly and just as softly as I spoke to him. “I never cared about being a good guy before I met you, Amy. I know it’s stupid to say you changed me, and maybe it wasn’t so much you changing me as much as it was me realizing I wanted to be better for someone. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to do something right. I wanted to make you proud of me.”

  His eyes fall on every surface in the apartment. He takes it all in, thinking quietly. I give him the silence even though a thousand questions are screaming in my head, wanting to be answered.

  “I know this isn’t anything like you grew up in. I know our apartment is small and the furniture is shit.”

  I laugh softly and I watch him smile, staring at the pictures on the far wall. Our mirage. Our life of memories that I don’t remember.

  He bites the inside of his cheek and purses his lips together.

  “But this place … this place is the best home I’ve ever had.”

  Tears fall down my cheeks quietly. I don’t understand why I’m crying, why I’m so moved by what he just said to me, but my heart is breaking for the man who always seems so confident, borderline arrogant.

  He sits in the chair, almost afraid to look at me, and all I want to do is go to him, comfort him in some small way.

  So I do.

  Slowly, I uncurl from the uncomfortable couch that should have been recovered or thrown into a fire at least ten years ago and walk to him. When I stand in front of him, he sits back on the couch, and without knowing what I’m doing, I fall into his lap.

  His arms wrap around me instantly, pulling my legs so I’m cradled in his lap and in his arms. His squeezes me tightly and buries his face into the crook of my neck. I wrap my arms around his neck and hold him close, feeling somehow closer to him in the silence and the wake of his admission than I have since the moment I opened my eyes to the stranger sitting in my room at the hospital almost two months ago.

  “Did you and Adam get everything worked out?”

  I look at Kelsey over the bar at Hooka’s. I left Adam a couple hours ago after we sat on the couch, not saying anything else to one another. I needed my space. I figure he did too since he was dressed for the gym with a pair boxing gloves draped over one shoulder when I headed out to the coffee shop.

  He looked like he had run a marathon, and I realized that even though we may have dated for two years, it was rare for Adam to open up to me the way he did this morning.

  It physically drained him.

  I felt the same way; which is why I found solace in slugging coffee drinks for the afternoon to a small crowd of artistic types who are probably more hung over than I am.

  I lift my shoulders in answer to her question. I still have so many things I need to know, like what she was doing in my apartment this morning. Somehow though, after everything he shared with me this morning, it feels almost like a betrayal to go behind his back and find the answers from Kelsey.

  And I realize as I watch my best friend that I want to trust him. Even when I don’t understand everything, or know everything, there is always something in me pulling me back to Adam. Wanting to know what he has to say, valuing it more than anyone else; even Kelsey.

  “We’re okay.” I offer a weak smile.

  She shuffles back and forth on her feet, mindlessly staring at the muffin case.

  “I wanted to explain this morning.”

  I hold up a hand. “Not necessary.”

  Her eyes narrow. “But he didn’t tell you, did he?”

  “I don’t know what you were talking about this morning, Kelsey. But, whatever it is, unless you’re involved, I don’t think I want to know.”

  “I feel like things are different b
etween us.”

  She bites her lips and I see the tears in her eyes. I walk around the bar and hug my best friend in the whole world. I wish I could tell her that things are going to be okay, that everything will be fine, but I can’t because I don’t want to lie.

  Something is different between the two of us. Maybe once I remember everything, I’ll understand. But for now, there is a divide that can’t be closed just because we want it to be.

  “It’s not your fault, Kels,” I tell her, hugging her as both of us begin crying softly. “I feel like I’m not the same. I know I changed and I don’t remember it, but I don’t think you can go through what I’m experiencing and not be changed by it, too.”

  She nods into my shoulder, sniffing her shoulder. “I love you.”

  I pull back from her and wipe my eyes. “I know. And I love you, too. I’m happy that you’re with Zander. And I think that once my memories come back, we’ll be fine. I just can’t make those promises right now.”

  “I know. I just miss you.” She grins, sort of. It’s a mix of a grin and a wince. “Oh, I wanted you to know. That girl Adam was talking to last night?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Zander talked to her after you left. Her name is Melanie and she works with Adam. I just thought you’d want to know who she is.”

  I don’t think it matters, but I thank her anyway.

  She leaves to meet up with Zander to hit their favorite hot springs.

  My cheeks blush thinking about the last time Adam and I went there. The grin on her face as she leaves and the wiggling of her eyebrows makes me laugh, knowing exactly what they’ll be doing there.

  “What a long day,” Preston says as she collapses next to me on a stool at the coffee bar.

  It’s almost ten o’clock at night and I can’t believe that I’ve been here for almost ten hours already. The day somehow flew by. Maybe it was just because I’ve been afraid to go back home and see Adam, uncertain of where we go from here.

  I’m finishing the final count on the cash register and Preston has just locked the doors and finished cleaning the floor for the night.