TIme After Time

neck. “I couldn’t sleep either. I’ve just been lying in bed, staring at my map, and thinking that, for the last few months, we’ve had all this distance between the two of us, you know?” She lets her hair fall, and then pushes it behind her ears. “And it suddenly dawned on me that tonight—finally—there was nothing between us but a door and a staircase, and it seemed”—she blinks fast—“silly.”

I nod. “That’s definitely silly.” Even though the room is dark, lit only by the porch light on the back patio, I can see her blush. “I’m glad you remedied that.” I say.

“Yeah, me too.”

“But there’s still more, you know?”

Her eyebrows lower and pinch together. “What do you mean ‘more’?” she asks.

I stretch my arm out in her direction, angling it so my fingertip comes within a centimeter of her knee. “There’s this distance here—a whole arm’s length—which is really quite a lot if you think about it. This is, like, seventh-grade-dance kind of distance.”

She laughs quietly. “That’s not even silly. That’s just…unacceptable.”

“Right? And then there’s this,” I say, pinching a corner of the wool blanket she covered me with a little earlier. “What do you make of this?”

She reaches out, rubbing the fabric between her thumb and her forefinger. “Yeah, that’s definitely a problem.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.”

I start to pull the blanket back, but before I can, Anna moves from the coffee table to the couch, sealing the opening shut with her weight. “What did you want to tell me earlier?” Her dark eyes fix on mine and I feel a sudden chill that hits my core. I wasn’t expecting this turn in the conversation, and I’m trying to decide how to start, but she doesn’t give me time.

“You aren’t staying this year, are you?”

I shake my head no.

She rolls her shoulders back and looks up at the ceiling. “I knew it. Every time I’ve mentioned something about school, you’ve looked away and changed the subject.” Her gaze ping-pongs around the room. Now she won’t look at me. “Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t.” I sit up so I can face her straight on. “Look, I’ve been experimenting with this all summer. I even told everyone I was going on a two-week climbing trip and took off by myself. I pitched a tent where no one would find it and went to London. I wandered around, enjoyed the sights—missing you the whole time, by the way—but after three days, I was knocked back to the tent. The migraine was excruciating, but just like I did when I first got to Evanston, I immediately closed my eyes and brought myself back. It worked. I stayed another day, almost two. But then I got knocked back to the tent again. I kept bringing myself back, but each time…” I trail off, shaking my head, remembering migraines so debilitating I could barely open my eyes for nearly an hour. “The side effects got worse, not better. After a week, I closed my eyes and nothing happened.”

“Why could you stay last time?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I think it’s because Brooke wasn’t where she was supposed to be, you know? Like…things were off and once they were righted again…” Anna just stares at me, and I look at her, trying to figure out what she’s thinking. “The two must be connected, because once she got back, I couldn’t return here. And now it looks like my ability to stay here has changed too.”

She still won’t look at me and she clearly doesn’t know what to say. She brings her hands to her forehead and rubs hard, like that will help the information sink in or something. “So, what? This is how it’s going to be?” she asks.

“I don’t know. This is the way it is right now.”

I feel horrible. Back in the beginning, I prepared her for the fact that I couldn’t stay here with her. I never should have let her believe that I could. I never should have let myself believe that I could.

“But I want to come back. A lot. I figure I can’t visit too frequently or your parents will get suspicious, you know, but we can come up with, like, a schedule or something.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“If you think about it, this is how we always thought it was going to be, right up until Vernazza. Remember?” I stop one step short of saying what I’m really thinking: You already agreed to be part of the most screwed-up long-distance relationship on the planet.

She wrings her hands while she weighs the pros and cons of everything I’ve just said. We’ll be together, but not every day, like we were before, and not on either of our terms. We won’t go to the same school or hang out with the same people and, at least while we’re both still living at home with our parents, we’ll spend most of our days seventeen years away from each other. So many people take proximity for granted. We just want to be in the same place at the same time.

Her eyes are fixed on the carpet. “I can handle a lot, you know? I can handle everything about you and what you can do, but what happened last time…I can’t let that happen to me again.” She lifts her head and looks right at me. “I know you didn’t want it to happen, and I realize you didn’t do it on purpose, but you were here and then you were just gone, and when you didn’t come back, I…”

She grabs a strand of hair and twists it around her finger. I’m just about to speak when she opens her mouth and looks me straight in the eye again. “Here’s the thing. When you left, I sort of…fell apart.” Her shoulders hunch forward and she starts breathing faster. “I mean, I completely fell apart,” she repeats. “I don’t fall apart, Bennett, and I don’t want to be someone who falls apart and…” She inhales deeply and wraps her arms around her waist. “I can’t let that happen again.”

I look at her, bracing myself for what she’s about to say. What she should say. She wants me to leave. She doesn’t want me to come back here again.

“I need to think about it,” she says.

The words aren’t as bad as the ones I was expecting, but they still take me by surprise. “Yeah.” It takes effort to keep my voice steady. “Of course you do.”

She presses her lips together, hard, like she’s holding something in, and I realize she’s trying not to cry. But I wish she would. I wish she would just sit here and fall apart, like she apparently did when I left, because unlike last time, I could actually be there for her now. I could tell her everything I would have said then: That we’ll be okay. That this whole thing is weird and twisted and unfair to both of us, but especially unfair to her, because it’s always harder to be the one who’s left behind than the one who leaves. And I’d tell her that I love her, and that I’ll do anything to be with her, any way I can be.

“When are you leaving?”

I swallow hard. “Friday. I promised my mom I’d be home for the weekend. Brooke’s heading back to college on Sunday.” I start to tell her about our plans to take the boat out on the bay but I decide against it. “Then I start school on Monday.”

She gives me a sad smile. “Me too.”

We’re both silent for a long time. She scoots back to her spot on the coffee table, and I think she’s about to say good night and head back upstairs, but she doesn’t move. I can tell she’s contemplating what to do next, and I should probably stay silent and not say anything that might sway her decision to stay, but I can’t help myself.

“I’m here now,” I say quietly.

She looks up from under her lashes. Then her expression softens and a smile spreads across her face. “I’m glad.” She reaches over, grabs the edge of the wool blanket, and rubs it between her thumb and her forefinger again. “There’s still the matter of this, you know?”

My heart starts racing and I laugh, happy to follow her lead. “Is that still there?” I lift up the edge of the blanket and Anna climbs underneath, stretching out next to me. Her arms wrap around my waist and she wedges one of her legs between mine.

“Much better,” she says, sliding her hands under my T-shirt, up my back, kissing me. In a matter of minutes, we both seem to forget about the complications around this whole crazy thing we’re doing. For the rest of the night, it doesn’t seem complicated at all.