Of course I liked him now, but we were also on vacation, responsible for no one and nothing, free to do as we pleased. Vacation is nothing like the real world; that's why we take them, to indulge in the fantasy of not living out our life choices for a little while.
We were both headed back to our real worlds soon; I didn't know what his was like, but mine included returning unopened wedding gifts and letting voicemail defend me from pitying phone calls.
It was all very sensible in my head, though saying it out loud made no sense to my heart.
Neither of us had room in our lives for this kind of attachment, and we agreed to leave whatever we shared here, just let it be what it was.
"But we still have the rest of today," I said, some delusional, hopeful part of me insistent on dragging out the inevitable.
Similarly afflicted, Nate nodded and said, "We do."
What little distance there was between us disappeared in a split second, the both of us turning at the same time, our bodies meeting in the middle, our mouths melting into each other's, our heartbeats pounding to the same desperate rhythm.
If all we had left was the vestiges of this night, then we might as well make it count.
Above us, the deepening sky sparked its stars to life, and we watched them shine for a moment before rising to our feet, fine dustings of sand falling away from us.
Silently we walked through the resort grounds, and when we came once again to the forked pathway that diverged toward our rooms at opposite ends of the hotel, we turned in the same direction this time.
It seems maudlin to say that my holiday experience pretty much ended the moment I waved goodbye to Nate as he boarded his shuttle to the airport some short hours later, but let's call it like it is.
I spent my last two days there not even trying to pretend I was up for wrangling a solo adventure, and just bummed around the resort, my listlessness seemingly tangible within a mile-radius; Alak looked concerned at me and offered to help me book a relaxation massage.
Just to have something to pass the time, I let him. It seemed to cheer him up.
When the time for my departure rolled around, I couldn't decide whether I was happy to leave or not. On the one hand, I was beginning to irritate myself with my incessant expectation of seeing Nate pop up everywhere; on the other, I was going back to my normal life as Emory, he of failed weddings and even worse receptions.
Still, happy or not, I left Thailand behind and got on a plane home.
A million hours later, having thoroughly enjoyed the vocal stylings of two distressed infants on each flight and probably the worst movies ever committed to film, I opened the door to my empty apartment, and a sigh shuddered out of an equally empty me.
Sadly, the pile of wedding presents hadn't miraculously vanished in the night. It's so typical of the fine china dishes you registered for not to run away with any of the matching cutlery when you want them to.
Having left my cell phone turned off while away, I retrieved it from the inside pocket of my carry-on and sank onto the couch to check my messages. Too tired to even contemplate holding the phone up to my head, I played the messages on speaker.
One by one, I listened to them, one from my mother, another from work. I stared at a blank wall, simply letting the sound waves filter around me and out of my way, until the next message came on.
"Hey, Em." Michelle's voice filled the space of my living room, and when it had nowhere else to go, kicked me in the stomach. "You're not picking up your phone... Um, I don't blame you, but I want to say that I'm really sorry about, um, the wedding and everything. I know it was--"
"--Message erased," said my loyal voicemail. "Next message."
"Hi, Em," said Michelle again. "Um, I don't know where you are, and Hal's obviously not talking to me right now, but I wanted to make sure you're okay? It'd be-- It'd be nice if we could still be friends. Call me when you get this, okay?"
No, thank you.
I went through the rest of my cell phone messages and deleted all the ones she'd left without listening to any of them in their entireties, feeling sick.
Leaving the wedding gifts alone for another day, I rolled my luggage into the bedroom. I had intended to unpack like a responsible adult but ended up shoving it against one bedroom wall. It could wait.
I showered and crawled into bed, tired all the way to my bones. Maybe when I awoke, seven years would have passed, and I'd wake up to an Emory who had his life together.
I had to Google the proper etiquette for dealing with the wedding gifts. It wasn't much, but if I was going to be a poor schmuck dumped at his own wedding, at least I wouldn't be a poor schmuck with no manners on top of it.
I also resolutely did not Google 'Nate Harris'. Since I was on the computer anyway, I thought I might as well upload my photos now or I'd never get around to it. One by one, they appeared on my screen, beach after beach, golden temples, wide spans of coconut trees. They all seemed so distant now, like someone else had gone and taken those pictures in my stead.
The picture of me and Nate on our last day came up, the only one of the two of us together, and I pretended it wasn't the reason I'd gotten my camera connected to the laptop before doing almost anything else.
It was a good picture. You could tell by the amount of time I spent staring at it.
Someone pinged me on Skype, and I jumped, startled out of my mooning. I'd forgotten that I was automatically signed in. It was Linnea, and although I didn't really want to talk to anybody at the moment, or for the next millennium, give or take a century, I accepted the call anyway. I'd catch hell otherwise.
"Hey, friend," she said warmly. "You made it home."
"Hey," I said.
"Are you tired? Is this a good time?"
She was tiptoeing around eggshells; normally she'd have barreled right through to whatever she wanted to talk to me about by now. From where my laptop's webcam was situated at the dining table, she could probably see some of my living room landfill, where good gifts go to die.
"Ah, yeah, it's fine," I said, figuring I might as well start getting used to real life again. "And you don't have to be extra nice to me about the whole wedding-falling-apart thing. I'm totally over it."
"My darling, you're the worst liar I've ever seen."
"Yeah," I agreed.
"We don't have to talk about it, though, if you don't want to," Linn said. She made an effort to perk up, sweeping her black bangs out of her eyes, her face taking on a breezy, bracing look. "We could talk about your trip? Tell me things; I've never been there. Did you get offered sex?"
In a way.
I shook my head. "I did not contribute to the sex trade, no. I know you're disappointed; I'm sorry."
Linn huffed through a smile. "You totally did Thailand wrong. Go back."
"Kinda wish I could. It was nice."
"Yeah? Did you take any pictures?"
"Oh, yeah. Um, I was just going through them when you called." Behind the Skype screen I could still see the bottom edge of the photograph of me and Nate; the sides of our feet were touching. I remembered how easy it felt crowding in next to him, our hips mashed together, arms crossing along our backs, his palm curving at my side. Out of view of the webcam, I raised an unthinking finger toward the seam between our shoes.
Linn leaned forward. "Ooh, I wanna see."
My hand flexed back from the screen. "Right now?"
"Yeah. Upload them somewhere where I can see, and then you can give me the lowdown on everything. It'll be like doing vacation slides, only across the Internet."
"Really?" I made a suspicious face into the webcam. "Nobody likes those."
"Pictures, Em," she pleaded.
I capitulated, hands up. "Okay, okay. This'll probably take a few minutes, so tell me what's up with you while I do this."
As she updated me on her adventures in parenting and pregnancy, I navigated to one of my image hosting accounts and started uploading the photos in bulk. On a sudden impulse, I removed the one of Nate from the album; he'd be my secret to keep.
I sent Linn the link, and we went through the pictures together, my dry explanations doing nothing to deter her from oohing and aahing her way through the entire album.
For some reason, though, talking to her about all the people, places and things I'd photographed, however tediously, made them seem more real than before. I had been there, I had done these things, I'd had fun.
"Whoa," she laughed, at an incredibly blurry picture of me, the one where I'd countered Nate's accusation of not smiling properly by then smiling like an escapee of an insane asylum.
Linn clicked to the next photo.
"Oh," she breathed. Her eyes flicked up to the webcam. "Em, who took these?"
In my admitted haste to scroll through all the pictures to get to the one of Nate, I hadn't noticed this one, which appeared to either have been taken by accident or on the sly, just after my unleashing of my maniacal smile. The picture was simply one of me laughing, because, I remembered now, Nate had been laughing.
"You look so happy there," Linn added, a curious lilt in her voice.
"Yeah, um, it was this-- I kinda made a friend when I was down there," I said.
In an instant, Linn went from slightly awed to full-tilt saucy. "Ooh, what kind of friend? Would I approve?"
Would she? Maybe. We'd never find out.
"A friend friend," I said unhelpfully. "A pal. A chum, some might say."
She made a scoffing noise. "I said what kind of friend, not give me useless synonyms for friend."
I rolled my eyes at the webcam, though it was unlikely she'd see it, her attention on the picture album. Still, I did it for the principle of the thing. "It was just-- this guy. We started talking one day and then... we hung out a bit."
And then I slept with him
.
"Is he cute?" she asked.
"Uh," I said, caught off guard. Why would she even ask me that? Did she know something I didn't know she knew? I fell back on a safe, "What?"
"Why is it," Linn said, "that guys always have so much trouble talking about whether other guys are hot? You don't ever see women having this problem. I can tell you five gorgeous women I'd go gay for right now."
She reeled off her list, which I could find no fault with.
"Yup," I agreed. "If I were you, I would also have no problem going gay for them."
She frowned at my circumvention attempt. "Do you have a picture of this guy? I will tell you objectively whether he is cute, and then when this comes up again, you can save yourself all that spluttering."
"Linnea," I said, in my most reasonable voice, "you're the only person I know who would ever ask me if some guy I met on vacation and will never see again is cute."
"Then you need better friends in your life," she said, mimicking my tone.
"You're all the friend I need," I said, overflowing with saccharin. "Hey, how's Clark doing?"
"My dearest hubby is great, thanks for asking," she said brightly. "And if he were party to this conversation, I think he'd agree with me that it's so cute how you're obviously trying to change the subject."
I grimaced minutely at the webcam, really not wanting to get into it. "Most people would be polite enough to let the subject change."
"Excuse me, did you just compare me to most people? You take that back," she said.
"Come over here and make me."
Linn snickered. "Okay, look, I'm not going to pry, even though you know I'm dying to. But if, whenever, you want to talk about it, I'm just a Skype button away."
My irritation melted away. I didn't want to talk about it, but it was nice to have the option. "I know," I said.
She smiled, reassuring even from three thousand miles away. "Good. So, what the hell is up with this thing? Are those tentacles?" she said, moving right along to another picture. "Did you actually eat this? It looks awesome."
We finished up the album and talked a little bit more about inconsequential things, my mind only half on the conversation.
I did actually want to tell somebody about Nate, about how crazy and unexpected it had all been, about how well we had seemed to fit together. But what would be the point? Whatever I was feeling now or might feel in the future didn't matter because I was never going to see him again.
And then there was a part of me that was afraid of voicing any of it at all. Once I hung real words on it, I wouldn't be able to take it back. I liked Nate. Some part of me that wasn't occupied with licking my wounds probably still loved Michelle.
Where did that leave me?
The remainder of my weekend was spent first calling my parents to assure them that I was alive, and then scrawling as many thank-you cards as I could get through without wanting to throw my fountain pen out the window. It seemed a bit unfair that on top of being the one left, I also had to be the one relegated to the task of writing things like:
Thank you for coming to be a part of what definitely ranks in the top five worst days of my life. While your generosity is much appreciated, I am returning this gift, as forced bachelorhood necessitates total abstinence from bamboo placemats and matching napkin rings in my daily life.
Too much?
Hal came over to pick up the gifts that could be dropped off locally, and did exactly that, saving me the trouble and embarrassment of showing up at my relatives' houses myself. The rest I had to haul over to the post office, single-handedly saving the United States Postal Service from bankruptcy with the shipping costs alone.
That done, Hal came back with a six-pack, and we watched a soccer match on TV for the rest of the evening. Despite us exchanging probably no more than two nonsoccer-related words, I felt better for having him around.
We had treaded the sticky waters of middle school together, as unlikely of friends as we had been -- I, scrawny and single-minded in my quest for straight A's, and he, a laidback, gentle giant happy to camp at the peak of the bell curve. We had been paired up one morning for the badminton unit in PE, found each other relatively tolerable and, later that day, he'd come to sit at my lunch table and then just never left. I never asked why he'd decided to sit with me and my similarly gawky, high-waist panted friends that day, but it turned out well for the both of us. He ended up being the only friend I'd keep from those hazy days of pre-algebra, Illinois history and the hot shame of adolescence.
Even after I trotted off to college and he stayed behind to work at his dad's contracting company, we'd managed to stay in touch somehow, though my memories of him are largely unaccompanied by any kind of soundtrack, his presence big enough to make words unnecessary. He'd always been comfortable with silence, knew when to speak and when not.
And now was a time for not. He didn't ask things like, "But how are you doing,
really
?" or do that sympathetic head-tilt at me; he didn't make me talk about my feelings; he just brought me beer and let me sit and eat nachos in peace, and I couldn't have appreciated it more.
Work was a vastly different circumstance on Monday morning.
I left the apartment with steel in my spine, ready to laugh off any mentions of my misfortune, but of course nobody would let me.
"Oh, honey," said Marybeth at reception as soon as she saw me trying to sneak into the clinic without anyone seeing.
"Please don't," I said.
"Okay," she said, a crease appearing on her already well-lined forehead as she peered solicitously at me over her purple-rimmed reading glasses, "but there's a casserole in the fridge for you, and you know, if you need anything else, you let us know, okay, hon?"
I mustered up a smile; even if unneeded, it was still nice that there were people willing to look out for me and occasionally feed me the best of Southern home cooking. "Thanks, Marybeth. I appreciate it," I said, and fled to the sanctuary of my office, where I huddled in the tepid glow of my computer screen until it was time to see my first appointment.
The day went on with other staff and therapists either speed-walking past my office or popping their heads in, well tilted, to give me bucking up speeches. I also somehow managed to amass a large handful of chocolates toward the end of the day, one of which I decided to set aside for my four o'clock client as a choice of reward if she did particularly good work, which was usually the case.
I went out to the reception area to get her. "Hi, Abby," I said, giving a short wave to her and her mother. "Julie."
"Hi, Mithter J," said Abby, smiling the untroubled smile of five-year-olds everywhere.
"You look so tan," said her mother, as we walked farther into the clinic toward my therapy room. "Is that from the honeymoon? How was the wedding?"
"Uh," I said, wondering how to make her stop, though clearly it was my fault for having blabbed about being affianced in our biweekly before- and after-session small talk. "It wasn't."
Julie's eyebrows came together, plainly confused, and I held my clipboard higher in front of my chest to protect myself from what was inevitably to be another pitying look. But then I had already collected so many today; what was one more?
She caught a glimpse of my left hand, holding the clipboard aloft, and noted the distinct lack of ring. "Oh," she said. "Oh my god, I'm sorry. What happened? Oh my god, I'm sorry, again, that is clearly not my business."
"It's okay," I said evenly. "Things just didn't work out."
And there was the look.
"That's a shame," she said. "Anyone would be lucky to have you."
I had been getting quite a lot of that, too. In theory, it was a nice thing to be told, but the obvious underlying assumption there was that I had been the one dumped, which seemed telling, especially coming from people unaware of the circumstances. Was it my face? Was my chin too pointy to warrant even a modicum of happiness? Was there some deeply ingrained, inherent Other Guy-ness about me that rendered me forever to wallow in second fiddle territory?
"Um, thanks," I said, because there was nothing better to say. "Okay, well, I guess we should get started. Come on, Abby, we have a couple of cool new games today."
While Julie stayed behind in the adjacent observation room, I took Abby to our therapy room, and by the end of the session was able to unload the chocolate I had saved for her, which was a pleasant end to a thoroughly awkward day.
By the end of the week, the chocolate dwindled along with the platitudes.
By the end of the month, things were nearly back on track to approaching normalcy. It helped that somebody else in the clinic broke her arm on a weekend ski trip, so she got put on casserole watch instead, and I, thankfully, slipped out of the office consciousness.
It seemed that I slipped out of Michelle's consciousness as well by that time, the number of her calls declining until finally there were no messages left to erase.
Subsequently, her absence from my life became something less of a black void. Occasionally I'd think of her and feel a deep need to go and cry in the shower, or throw something breakable at something even more breakable, but these too passed eventually, until I could think of her and convince myself that I felt almost nothing. Some days I was more convincing than others.
It was harder with Nate, which I hadn't expected. Compared to the years of history I had with Michelle, Nate was, or at least should have been, an insignificant drop in the ocean. But the few days we'd had together were as near to perfect as anyone could reasonably imagine, and with him, there were the tantalizing threads of
what if
.
What if that near perfection could have gone on forever?
What if I had already let go of the best chance of happiness I'd ever had?
What if he was mine? What then?
As much as I knew it was useless to keep following those threads just to see where they led, I couldn't shake the urge off. Even when I was getting better at suppressing them, they would come at me out of the blue; a certain kind of build of a stranger who walked past me on the street, the color of the sky on a particularly sunny day, the aroma of something almost identifiable -- anything and everything seemed capable of looping back to Nate somehow.
I imitated normalcy as best as I could, practicing at it in the hopes that one day it would take, but there were the quiet nights here and there when I'd lie awake, challenging the ceiling to staring contests and asking it what if.
And the more I chased these endless threads, the clearer it became that I couldn't call it an aberrance anymore, couldn't completely ascribe it to being a different me for a week, because a bolder, more intrepid me still housed
me
at his core. It wasn't just that I had enjoyed Nate's company, it was that I had
liked
him, so much and in so many ways, and trying to get the gist of what that meant was bringing up all kinds of unsettling, inarticulate thoughts that I couldn't sift through on my own.
Finally, sick of driving myself crazy, I flashed an emergency distress signal to Linnea. I needed someone else, someone with more credibility than myself, to tell me to get a grip. If I had her in person I could count on her to shake me by the shoulders in addition, but getting her to shout at me over Skype would have to do.
"Hey, hon." She was wearing her glasses, the thick, black-framed ones that meant business, her long hair gathered at the top of her head in some half-hearted approximation of a bun, and I was afraid I had interrupted her working on something more pressing than my existential crisis, but she smiled and said, "What's up?"
I stopped my frantic chewing on my thumb for long enough to say, "I sent you an email."
"Uh, and you called me just to tell me that?" Linn said flatly, though from the video feed I could see that she was already checking her inbox.
I watched her click the email open and could pinpoint the moment she downloaded the file I'd attached, a photograph.
"This is the friend you made in Thailand," she said, not at all a question.
"Yeah," I said.
"Em, what kind of friend?" she asked, though it sounded like she didn't really need me to answer and wanted me to say it for myself, the way teachers patiently extract answers they know you know, somewhere in the jumbled mess of your adolescent mind.
"A we-slept-together kind of friend." There, now it was real, and I couldn't unmake it.
Linn looked at the picture again. "Well, he
is
really cute, so..." She gave me two thumbs up and a questioning grin.
"Did you know? That I'm..." I wasn't sure how to finish the sentence, the words available to me too restrictive and too expansive all at once.
"Kind of, I guess. I suspected," she mused, resting her chin on the heel of one hand. "There was this guy who lived down the hall from me, you know, during grad school, and I so wanted to set you up with him, but then you started dating Dani, and then Michelle after that, and then you almost got
married
to her, and then I thought I probably shouldn't give him your number after all."
"Well, I probably wouldn't have taken it anyway," I said.
Linn frowned. "Why? I have impeccable taste. He was totally cute, and in med school. Dude, you could be dating a doctor right now."
I shook my head, chuckling softly. "I wasn't-- I don't--" I said, unable to find what I wanted to say. Slowly, struggling to get my thoughts in order, I added, hoping she would understand what I was trying to get at, "I wouldn't have let myself."
"Why?" she asked again, softer this time.
It took me a minute to marshal the honesty that the question deserved, to call to mind memories interred somewhere deep down and far away. I had always been a bit different, keenly aware of it, eager to resolve it, but not knowing quite what it was that set me apart from the other boys. I liked all the same things they liked -- Super Nintendo, trading cards, whichever girl was deemed the cutest in our class that year. And whichever boy was cutest in our class, I liked him too. It didn't occur to me not to, though I learned quickly to chalk it up to admiration rather than attraction, and eventually, not to think of it at all once I realized I wasn't supposed to.
"I never do. I never have," I said quietly, half to myself. "It's just easier that way, you know?"
It had been a lot easier, in fact, carrying around a vague sense of dissatisfaction, as most people do, for one thing or another, than shouldering the guilt of being different, and it had been easier, in many ways, to try harder at being not different, until trying became an entrenched habit in itself.
I looked, sometimes, but never let it get any further than that, guilt-ridden enough with that tiny indulgence, knowing intellectually that it wasn't wrong but feeling bone-deep that it was.
Armed and delusional with the false security of being unEmory for a week, Nate had been the first time I'd ever let myself feel what had always simmered underneath the carefully cemented, fortified, steel-reinforced surface, and now I couldn't not feel it. How unfair that I had built all those defenses with all that work, and Nate could simply come along, tap a little chink in it and make it all crumble away like it was nothing.
It was freeing, in a way, saying these few words to Linn, letting them out of the barbed-wire cage of my head, but mostly it was terrifying. I couldn't take back what I'd said about Nate, and I couldn't take back what I'd said about myself either. I knew she would never let me, and maybe that was why I'd come to her in the first place.
"I just didn't want to be different from all the other kids, and I guess it stuck," I said. "And I still don't want people to look at me now like I'm different."
Linn nodded in understanding but said, "You know the people who matter will just look at you like you're
you
, right? I mean, honey, I'm looking at you right now and you look the same as you did, like, five years ago. It's really infuriating, by the way, how you haven't aged at all, and I know you don't even use moisturizer, so that's doubly enraging."
A laugh bubbled out my throat unexpectedly. "I can't help it if I have good genes, okay?"
"Ugh, so unfair," she said. "But hey, just for the record, there's nothing wrong with a little guy-on-guy action. Many women find it quite hot, in fact."
I laughed again, glad to have called on her services. "So you're saying that if I swing both ways, that actually works in my favor?"
"You'll have to beat them off with a stick, my friend. Especially if you're doing it with this Thailand guy, because he is-- I mean, seriously, well done." She fanned herself.
"All right, we've hit the point of diminishing returns on helpfulness now."
Linn chuckled, and accordingly turned her levity down to a low simmer. "What's his name?" she asked gently.
"Nate. Harris."
"And what brings Nate Harris to our discussion table today?"
I worried the inside of my bottom lip. "I can't stop thinking about him," I admitted in a rush, cringing at how ridiculous I sounded. A few more confessed feelings and I'd have a cloying pop song on my hands.
"How can I help?"
"Tell me to stop?"
"Okay," Linn said. She took a moment to think. "Em, you're just coming off a three-year relationship. It ended horribly, and this guy happened to be there to pick you up. It felt good only because you needed something good."
I nodded vigorously as I listened, as if the harder I nodded the better her words would stick with me.
"And, you know," she went on, losing the sage edge a little, "obviously yay that you learned something exciting and new about who you are, and good job to Nate Harris for bringing that out in you, but you don't need him anymore. You learned what you needed to learn from him, and now it's time to move on. You're rebounding, really hard. But that's all it is."