Asa didn’t understand, and he wondered if he ever would.
“Wow, I didn’t expect it to be this crowded,” Carmen interrupted his stream of thoughts, her voice louder than usual as she tried to speak over the loud chatter of everyone else. “I feel like we’ve been standing on this same spot for ages now.”
“High school football is a pretty big deal around this town,” Asa said easily enough, his voice not giving away the vulnerability that came with being around Carmen.
A few more minutes passed and the two of them had finally made it to the exit when something caught Asa’s eye.
He didn’t stop walking—his hand hovering over Carmen’s lower back, but not actually touching it as she walked ahead of him—when Isla’s eyes met his from where she remained seated at the top row of one of the stands.
Her eyes flickered to Carmen, who hadn’t noticed her yet, before landing once again on Asa. And then Isla blinked once, slowly, and nodded with a faint smile on her face.
Was that approval? Encouragement? Support? Was that Isla telling him she was glad to see them standing side by side again? Asa didn’t know, but that moment seemed to hold some kind of significance that he couldn’t describe yet.
Isla’s figure kept growing smaller the more Asa and Carmen continued moving forward, but he didn’t look away yet and parted his lips, about to mouth a silent goodbye to her when suddenly the bleachers disappeared from view and was replaced with a small stretch of wall and then the open space of the parking lot. They’d finally made it past the exit gate.
He swallowed back that goodbye and breathed in the fresh night air.
Out here, it was cooler and the atmosphere was free from the stench of sweat, smell of junk food and the humidity that came with so many bodies being in close proximity.
“You see Joyce yet?” Asa asked, tucking his hands into his pockets because he didn’t want to give into the urge to hold hers.
He watched Carmen chew on one corner of her lip, those eyes of hers scanning the area around them as she turned her body around in a full circle. “Nope.” She shook her head. “Her car’s right there, though.”
“We’ll wait there then.” Asa shrugged, his eyes following the direction Carmen’s hand was pointing in. “Come on.”
Carmen seemed to hesitate for a second—just a second—before she began walking towards the dark grey vehicle. She looked like she wanted to say something but Asa didn’t push; he didn’t know what pushing was going to achieve this time when it hadn’t worked so well before.
An uncomfortable silence passed before she finally spoke. “You don’t have to…I mean, you can leave you know. It’s—it’s really all right. She’ll be here any minute.”
She wasn’t looking at him though, her eyes fixed on her left foot drawing patterns on the ground, and the only sound filling the space between them was their breaths and the soft crunch of gravel.
“Carmen,” he said carefully. “Look at me.”
Her foot paused in the middle of a pattern and was raised a few inches off the ground. Tilting her head towards him in acknowledgment, but not meeting his eyes yet, she let her foot fall back flat on the gravel.
“Are you not…” The words trailed off Asa’s tongue, slipping back down his throat and choking him. But he ground his teeth together and forced them out. “Are you not comfortable with being alone with me anymore?”
Startled eyes met his, bewilderment flashing through them and the genuine look of shock told him that he was wrong. “No, of course not,” Carmen said incredulously. “Why would you think that?”
Asa opened his mouth to say something, stopped himself, and then sighed. “I don’t know, you seem to be a little off now that we’re not in a crowded place and it’s just the two of us. Or am I just reading too much into things?”
Her eyes left his once again and went back to tracing the invisible patterns her foot began recreating. The sound of gravel crunching filled the distance between them again.
A beat of silence passed. Then another.
Asa didn’t push. He waited.
“I…” Carmen began after a while, pausing to swallow and hesitate. “I don’t want you to have to put yourself through being in my presence out of courtesy. I mean,… waiting here with me is… it’s nice. It’s considerate. But if it’s making you unhappy to be around me, I’ll be safe. Joyce will be he—” Carmen stopped speaking as her eyes seemed to register something in the distance. “Oh, look. She’s already here!”
Asa looked over his shoulder and spotted Joyce walking towards them while talking to another girl, her forefinger wearing the key ring of what was probably her car’s as she kept twirling it in the air. He turned his face around to look at Carmen, a million things running through his head now that his time with her was really coming to an end. With every step Joyce took in their direction, there was another addition to the list of things Asa wanted to suddenly tell her.
Carmen stepped away from him, adding another mile to the space between them.
“Bye, Asa.” She offered him a small smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She took another step back. “I’ll see you around school, maybe.” She tried to widen her smile, but the corners of her lips seemed to wobble and she dropped it, turning her head away and taking another step to open the passenger seat of Joyce’s car.
And the passenger seat in Asa’s truck remained empty.
He turned
