by Bromberg, K
“You waited,” I said, and smiled.
“You asked me to.” Her face was closed off. I knew we had a lot of talking to do. I reached for her elbow, and then the small of her back, as if we had been together for years and this was a casual touch that a long-term boyfriend would give to his partner. She moved in concert with my motion, and it all flowed.
Something clicked, and there I was.
In the zone.
She stopped and turned toward me, her hands reaching out, stroking my arms as if she were trying to verify that I was really here. It pleased me at the same time that it pained me, because I knew why. “What next?” she asked.
I looked at my phone, waiting to answer her. 1:15 AM. “It’s late,” I said. “Do you have a place?”
She pulled back a bit. “I do,” she said, slowly, with caution.
My words came out in a jumbled mess. “I didn’t mean to imply that,” I assured her, but even as it came out I was a little disappointed.
And I think that I saw disappointment in her eyes, too. “I just meant,” I said, softly, bending down to whisper in her ear, “I don’t want to stop being with you.”
“I don’t want to stop being with you either, Sam,” she said. “How about we walk back to my apartment and we’ll just take things from there?”
Amy
The cold blast of late summer air felt like walking into another dimension. Sam’s arm was around my shoulders, and even though it was still summer, in New England it already felt like October. We both shivered.
When he’d suggested going back to my apartment I’d had an involuntary reaction of no—not because I didn’t want to take him back to my apartment and make love with him—but because it caught me off guard. It seemed too abrupt.
His assurances made a difference. I didn’t want to stop being with him either. I didn’t want the night to end. The thirty minute walk back to my apartment yawned before us, the giant elephant of the years between our then and our now balanced between us, on our shoulders. I decided to acknowledge it.
“Why did you shut me out?” I asked, my voice quiet.
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, clearly struggling. The world suspended itself around us. My whole life was in this timeless minute, because I was about to hear the explanation for the unexplainable four and a half years later.
“I’ve thought about that a lot, Amy. I don’t have an easy answer,” he said.
I wanted to interrupt him but I kept my mouth shut. He needed to tell me this, and it needed to be one-hundred percent on him.
“When you won the debate,” he said, slowly, “you won.” He tipped my head up to look me in the eye—he was a head taller. “You won decisively.” He shook his head. “You were so fine up there, on your game.”
“So were you,” I interrupted, breaking my own vow.
“But you were better,” he said, simply. “I had a lot riding on that debate.”
“We all did,” I said.
A pained expression covered his face. “There’s so much more to this than I can explain right now, but please let me say what I can say,” he stressed.
I nodded. Our legs began to walk in concert, left and left, right and right. “Okay.”
“My dad,” he said, the words coming out bitterly, “told me that at all costs, I needed to make it into the top three. And if I didn’t, I was a worthless piece of shit.”
“Oh, Sam,” I whispered.
“Let me finish,” he said, holding out one hand, palm to me, his voice shaky, “because if I don’t finish, I don’t think I can do this.”
“This?”
“Oh, I can do this,” he stressed, stroking my hip and my ribcage with one hand, making me hot and needy, and wanting so much more. “But Amy,” he said, plaintively, stopping and turning toward me, his hands on my shoulders, his eyes serious. “What I need to do first is this: I need to tell you what happened.”
He sighed, his words taking on a gravitas that made time move slower. “My dad told me I had to win, and I had to win in order to get the debate scholarship to one of my top three schools. If I didn’t, it was Bible school. The same Bible college he attended before becoming a pastor. And that was it. So, you won and I left, knowing what I was about to go home to.”
“And what did you go home to?”
His face hardened and he closed off.
I could hear thousands of words in his silence, all of them thorned and barbed. I didn’t want to put him through reliving that, so I didn’t press.
Someday, when he was comfortable, he would tell me, and I would help him, and we would be okay. Now was too soon.
I reached up and kissed him gently on the lips, standing on tiptoe. “You don’t have to do this all right now, Sam.”
“I know.” His words hung in the air.
We continued walking, both eager to see what came next. “But I want you to understand that I was... stupid. There’s really no other word for it. I got home, and, uh... the world ended with my dad—that’s the easiest way to put it—and I just froze. Everything changed. I had to scramble to survive, and I became someone else because I had to.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his hair, his jaw clenched, his body tight and restrained. “Amy, I just...” he stumbled. “Can we leave it at that? Can we just say that it’s like I disappeared and a different Sam—let’s call him Robot Sam—kicked in and everything was about functioning, and nothing was about emotion. It was easier to shut everything out, because I learned a hard lesson that day at home.”
“What lesson?” I whispered.
“There’s no such thing as unconditional love.”
I closed my eyes. The thorned and barbed words were as I had expected. What I wanted to say, what pushed against my lips so hard to come out but remained behind my teeth was—
Let me help you unlearn that lesson.
Sam
I was dying.
It’s so much easier to shut down, to close off, to protect yourself and never look at your emotions. I’d done more than ignore my emotional past. I’d put it in a box inside me, padlocked the box and thrown it and its key in separate oceans. And now Amy was asking me to find the key and the box, and unlock everything.
We walked in silence for a long time, the peaceful presence of her enough. Words weren’t needed. Most people fill the space between them and other humans with speech. It clouds everything if words are used like that.
Chatter for the sake of chatter is like crappy junk food.
It just makes you feel full, and then sick, and then you regret you ever partook.
Amy stopped at a brick building, weirdly angled into not-quite an L shape. She punched a code into the security door and took my hand, fingers entwining as we went in. We walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and instantly, we were in an apartment the size of a healthy walk-in closet.
“Is this your place?” I said. “This is all of it?”
“Pretty much. There’s a bathroom right there.” She opened the door two or three feet, and then pushed something—I realized it was a futon—aside in order to open the door the whole way.
“This is your entire apartment?” I said, incredulous.
She frowned “Yeah, it’s mine. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing is wrong with it. It’s...” I looked around. “It’s quirky. I like it.”
Her shoulders lowered and she sighed. “Thanks.”
“This must be dirt cheap,” I said.
She grinned. “Yes, it is. And no roommates.”
A brief image of Joe coming out into the kitchen to grab sex food for Trevor and Darla floated through my mind. “What a luxury.”
“I don’t want to talk about my housing situation, Sam.”
She sat down on the futon, her body so graceful I enjoyed watching how she moved, the curve of her hip, the stretch of her calf, how her wrist pivoted as she stretched, then folded herself into comfort.
Mimicking her, I folded my legs and sat directly across, nervous yet fully present.
She took my hands. “I want to talk about us.”
“Is there an ‘us’?” I asked.
“That’s up to us.”
“Well then, what does us think?”
She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. “Us thinks that us needs to work this out.”
“Well, us is really, really, really sorry for being such an asshole four and a half years ago.”
“Us is pleased that us realizes that he’s an asshole.”
“Oh, us is now he?” We both laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
The sound of my dad’s scream echoed through my ears, how he had bellowed what a worthless piece of shit I was, how he had ordered me to go to Bible college, and how, when he punched me with the full force of his rage, for the first time in my life, I had hit back.
All of it poured into my soul as I looked Amy in the eye and I had to compartmentalize, shut that shit down, push it away, and still look at her and be a human being.
The familiar thrashings of anxiety, or panic—or whatever the fuck you called this intruder inside my body that took over when I least expected it—made me feel like I was nine different people in my own head, all at once.
I couldn’t tell her the truth about what Dad had done when I had gone home from that debate, because I couldn’t share how damaged I really was.
Not that I thought that alone would drive her away, but I thought her knowing might drive me away.
I didn’t want to be that guy again.
I felt like I had been drowning for years, and that Amy had reached out and pulled me to shore, given me CPR and got me breathing again. Each ragged breath I took right now, as I stared into her eyes and tried to figure out what to say next, was one more breath I didn’t have to take alone.
The words all just felt like stabs, so I turned the words off, reached over, stretching myself fully, and kissed her. The skin of her jaw was soft and hard at once, and her lips melted into mine.
“Amy,” I whispered, the need growing so swiftly inside me, as if saying her name could make all of this more real.
Amy
Real.
This was real.
Sam was kissing me again. We were in my apartment, and we weren’t high school students any more. No artificial barriers. No classrooms, no coaches, no parents.
An ache deep inside came to the surface, breaking like a cresting wave, and I leaned into the kiss, my hands hungry for more of him, palms reaching under his t-shirt, hands meeting hot, firm flesh with rippled muscles and the movement of his body against mine as his hands echoed my own need.
Four years.
For years I’d waited and wondered what might have been. Would we have been together through college? Would we have gone to the same school, or spent our weeks apart, together on weekends? Getting married now, after graduation? Some of my friends were engaged, a few of them actively planning weddings.
Whatever wondering I had faded fast as the hot push of Sam’s hands against my breasts made me moan his name. A penetrating overwhelm made my body go hard and soft at once. For all I’d built up this moment in my head, reality wasn’t letting me down.
I wasn’t letting go, either.
As our mouths and hands explored each other, Sam’s apologized, too. I could feel it in how tender he was, how he alternated between passion and restraint. Could a kiss say “I’m sorry”?
Could the next one say, “Let’s try again”?
And the third ask, “May I make it up to you”?
I wasn’t the same Amy who cried for months and checked my phone compulsively two hundred times a day, waiting for a text that never came. That girl was long gone, replaced by the woman who pressed her belly against Sam’s, whose arms and hands and lips gave as much as he took, and who wasn’t going to allow everything to be this easy, if that’s what I wanted more than anything in the world.
Because easy wasn’t cutting it.
Easy was the easy way out.
Breaking the kiss, we panted for a few breaths, eyes meeting. In his I saw so many emotions—desire, regret, excitement—and I imagined I mirrored those right back.
“Why, Sam? Why now?”
Our knees pressed into the futon, both of us half upright, arms wrapped around but pulled back. My breasts rose and fell with each fevered inhale and exhale, while Sam’s abs worked hard against his shirt, his breathing no less labored than my own.
“Because when I touch you I feel like the world makes sense.”
The cloth of my futon rubbed against my knees, the raspy sound amplified a thousand times in my ears. Moonlight spilled in through my window, and the air went warm, like a billowing curtain brushing against my skin as a gentle breeze turned the tiny apartment into a rapturous asylum from the craziness of the world.
His fingers brushed against my arm as he held me, eyes open and intense, vulnerable and seeking.
The next kiss wasn’t an apology.
It was a demand.
Chapter 4
4.5 years ago
Amy
I didn’t know that I could feel this sick to my stomach.
National qualifier tournament for debate. The top three would go to national competition this summer.
Someone once told me that debating was like playing chess. You had to see how it was all going to end eight, ten, fifteen, twenty moves in advance, and to understand the possible consequences of each choice that you made. Every word that came out of your mouth, each sentence that you formed and put forth had to convince that judge that you had a better argument than the person you were trying to defeat.
It was incredibly rare, in teenage life, to be able to tell adults something and be believed.
Debate wasn’t a popularity contest. It wasn’t about looks. I didn’t have to be well dressed beyond looking professional and businesslike. I didn’t have to wear the right lipstick, or the perfect earrings, or be fashionable, or talk about the right pop culture trend.
I could talk about the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. I could talk about civil liberties, and questions about the rights of the majority versus the minority were my playing field—not perfumes and self-tanners.
Living in the suburbs of Boston, with nationally-ranked school districts and parents who mortgaged their careers to get a house, everything was about competition. The pressure began before you were potty-trained.
I had to do all the right activities starting in middle school, learn the right instruments, speak the right foreign languages, volunteer at the right centers, all for the Holy Grail of getting into the best college possible. Around here that was Harvard, MIT and Yale—and if you couldn’t get into one of those top three, you were lesser.
As we got ready for the crackdown where people stopped making eye contact in the halls, where competitors that you’d joked with three weeks ago suddenly clung to their notes and turned away, whispering in corners — this was real life.
All of it changed relationships.
I flipped through my pages, preparing for my next debate. I saw Sam walk by again, running a hand through that auburn hair. Oh, how I wished it were my hand. Memory took over my mind and body, the thought of his arms around me just two weeks ago so evocative.
He stopped at a drinking fountain and bent over, the gray wool of his suit stretching tight across his shoulders. His lips drank greedily from the stream of water, and suddenly everything else disappeared. The butterflies in my stomach, the tightness in my shoulders, the sense that everything hinged on what I was about to do today—it all rushed away in one mad wave.
All that was left was me taking in everything about this one person who mattered more than anything I was about to do today.
Sam
Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up.
My entire future rested on today. My dad had told me that everything weighed on this win—everything. I had to make i
t to Nationals. The top three would make it, and I had to be one of those three. Just third would do; even Dad had relented on that point. It wasn’t about being number one.
For once, it was about being good enough.
And yet, good enough would be damn hard.
Dad was a minister at a local church, a pillar of the community. That made me a preacher’s kid. He wasn’t a preacher in the southern sense, though. No one here in New England would tolerate anything quite as big as what Dad called a “Holy Roller,” but he had a way of making sure that God infused everything in our lives.
Funny how God always seemed to have the same exact views as Dad, no matter what the subject.
I’d gone to a small private school from preschool to eighth grade, learning everything through the lens of God. When money started to get tight, he’d relented and let me go to the local public school.
I’d been shocked my first session of science class, sitting in a biology lecture, and learning about evolution. Dad had told me that evolution was something that people had created as a way to separate us from God, so I knew the basics. The scary part was that now I was being told to bridge two worlds, somehow to remain devout and without sin—or at least with as little sin as possible.
“Fake it,” Dad said. “Get good grades and pretend enough to get the grades you need, and don’t let it bother you. God knows that you understand it’s just not true, and there’s no violation of God’s law unless you choose to actually believe it.”
Violently poison-tongued, my father could wield words like weapons, especially when he had too much to drink. And that was the first lie, the central lie, that taught me how to really pretend to believe something that wasn’t true.
The fact was that my father was supposed to be an ethical man, the interpreter of God for his flock, and yet at home he was a tyrant.
Back then, though, in ninth grade, sitting there while my teacher explained the role of vestigial limbs or why humans walk upright, I found a divergence. It was the same feeling today, getting ready for debate. It was a sense that I was being told to go through the motions for the sake of the motions, but I was actually doing it because it’s what I believed.