“It’s not about fixing anything.” She tried to frame her explanation carefully. “It’s more about how we never even talked about whether or not we’d stay together next year. You just sort of assumed.”
She winced; it sounded accusatory. But Daniel nodded in agreement. “I know. You’re right. That was really stupid and disrespectful of me. I fucked up and I’m sorry.”
“No, Daniel, it’s not—you don’t have to keep apologizing, it wasn’t disrespectful at all. It was just…we didn’t talk about it. We should have and we didn’t.”
“I know. I know. I’ve got, like, a deficiency. But all this is stuff I can work on. I just have to—”
“This isn’t about you!” This time Melissa was pretty sure she meant to yell. “You just keep saying you’re sorry, and you’re not even listening to me. It’s disturbing.”
“Disturbing,” he said quietly. Then he nodded in a way that told Melissa he was etching the word into some mental checklist, as if she’d meant it as an indictment of his whole character. As if she’d said, Daniel Benson is a disturbing human being. She thought he might be trying to punish her.
“You always do this,” she said, while an inner voice implored her to leave the room and take some time to compose her thoughts. “This is why it’s been so hard to talk to you lately.”
On TV, the zombie horde was crashing against the barbed-wire fence of a prison while marines steeled themselves for the assault. Daniel picked up the remote and turned the TV off and muttered something about symbols being everywhere. Melissa immediately missed the background noise.
“This just seems like a little thing in the scheme of Daniel and Melissa,” he said, tossing the remote onto the bed and pacing to the closet and back. “You take us, what we are to each other, and it forms this ecosystem”—he drew a big circle in the air—“and so if you introduce any external forces to our ecosystem, some kind of new problem, it might be tough for us to deal with, but it’s still easier to do it inside our ecosystem, where we can deal with things as a team. You see what I mean? This whole going-off-to-college thing—we can stretch our ecosystem across two states, and even though we’ll be in different places physically we’ll both be together inside it, because it’s made up of two years together, and you can’t just make that go away overnight. It’s a whole world just for us, Melissa! We made it. You and me and nobody else. And it can’t just disappear.” A pained look crossed his face. He glanced at his wrist as if checking an imaginary watch. “I’m not sure if I said that right.”
“No, Jesus Christ, I get what you’re saying fine, but we’re still coming from totally different places. This magical ecosystem isn’t a thing that just exists forever. You assume that it is, but we have to work to keep it going. If we stop working on it, then it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not something we can pop in and out of, not when I’m in New York—”
“Meeting a coxswain.” Daniel grabbed his left thumb with his right hand.
“What? What the hell’s a coxswain?”
“The guy in charge of the boat on the crew team.”
“Why would I— This isn’t about our ecosystem at all, is it?”
“Yes it is,” Daniel insisted. “It’s about you and me and—”
“It’s about you! It’s about you being jealous!”
Daniel looked scared. “I’m not a jealous person.”
Melissa closed her eyes and wondered how they’d reached this point. It was like they’d been using Epheme, erasing what came before, leaving them unmoored and adrift. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. When she opened her eyes, Daniel looked like he’d awakened in the middle of a night terror. She crossed the room and put her arms around him. He kissed the top of her head and held her close.
“Don’t say it doesn’t matter,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It matters to me. Everything you do matters to me more than anything, okay? Fuck Princeton, fuck basketball, fuck my whole future—”
“Don’t say that.”
“There’s just you, Melissa.”
“Stop.”
“I love you so much.”
“I love you too.” The words came out easily, but she had no idea if they were true. The impulse to simply make the hurt stop was nearly overwhelming.
“So then what’s the point of ending anything?” he said. She could feel his heart racing, and it made her nervous. She took a step back. “There’s no point,” he continued. “People wait and see. That’s what they do. They don’t just end things for no reason, not when they both still love each other.”
“I feel like when you say things like Fuck my whole future, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. There’s a big difference between how you see things and how I see things, and it’s nobody’s fault, it just is.”
“I only meant my future without you in it, Fabes. Not my future now. They’re two different futures.”
“That’s too much for me, Daniel. I can’t be in charge of your happiness. Or whatever.”
“You’re not.” The way he was suddenly smiling made her feel very uncomfortable. The muscles in his face were moving too fast. “I’m okay. Seriously. I love you and I want to be with you. That’s all. There. See? I’m expressing myself clearly. Boom. From now on, I got this.”
Melissa sat down in the armchair and slipped her feet into her flats. “I think I need to get some air.”
“Good idea,” he said, looking around for his shoes.
“I mean alone, Daniel. I just need to clear my head for a minute.”
“Just show me one boob first,” he said, a callback to a running joke they’d abandoned in tenth grade. “Just the left one.”
She grabbed her phone from the nightstand and stood up.
“I love you,” he said. “I love the way you play with your hair when you don’t even realize you’re doing it.” She found that she could not look at him. It was like being in a room with
