Hit or Miss

Hit or Miss

They strolled casually, laughing and talking, occasionally racked so completely with humor that the girl found herself leaning lightly against her larger, decidedly more masculine companion for support. The day was fall, but warmer than it should have been, really, for that time of November. Leaves crackled under their feet, and the girl, looking younger than 22, skipped merrily over them, crunching them beneath her feet as she encountered piles. The boy (man, really, being 25), smiled affectionately, occasionally kicking excess leaves toward her aged Adidas running shoes. It made her eyes sparkle more, he noted, and that was always a good thing.

The sun allowed them to roam at dusk without coats, and it was too early for the sunset for her Californian tastes now that she had seen the world, but he was there and the sun could set at noon as long as he’d stay. She accidentally-on-purpose kicked his ankle lightly, and he fixed her with a level mock-glare undermined by his perpetual laugh. Back, before now, before they had grown up into the mature and sensible adults that they pretended to be, he could have picked her up and spun her, held her there, laughed at the utter absurdity of the moment. He couldn’t do that anymore. They were, ostensibly, adults.

He hated the word as much as she did, in all her sun-tanned, sun-kissed blonde glory. He visited her once, and they lay on the beach, talking as they were now, and things long unsaid had been too close to the surface, so he jumped the waves and learned how to surf. She taught him.

She’d taught him many things over the years, over these years he wouldn’t trade for anything, but the least important was how to surf.

Or maybe, in fact, that was the most important.

Because who in the world could instruct him athletically but a small, clumsy girl who couldn’t throw a ball and was deathly afraid of the ocean but who, once in the vicinity of a wave, seemed to own the entire Pacific?

Only her. It had always been her, and he had a feeling it would always be.

It had been a thing with which he had never been comfortable. Back then, they were kids, even more so than they are now; back then, he couldn’t handle the ramifications of manifesting the thoughts he tried so valiantly to stop.

They never went away, and so he bought his plane ticket to California, and she taught him how to surf, and she taught him how to laugh again, and she taught him how to ride the wave, balanced, until it hit the shore, exit gracefully, and move on to bigger and better things.

Boarding the plane to leave was the hardest thing he had ever done.

When he left, he took his surfboard and a seashell she’d picked from the beach, with shells strewn over it so completely that both of their feet were lacerated and it stung to run through the frothy front of the ocean in the mornings when they went jogging. Half an hour, she searched for the shell, on the conquest for the perfect mollusk’s-home, and when she found it, she presented it to him, looking shy and hugely pleased with herself at the same time.

He’d almost kissed her then, but he hadn’t, and he’d almost cried then, but he hadn’t; he took the shell, slipped it into the pocket of his bathing suit, blinked, tapped her arm, and told her he was hungry, it was dinnertime.

He didn’t look out the window on the plane ride back. He stared at the flight attendant, informing him of exactly what to do would the plane crash into the Mississippi, and tried to blank out the memory of her smile and her laugh and her eyes and her voice and everything about her that told him to get the hell off the plane and move to LA permanently.

When the plane leveled after liftoff, he turned up his headphones and drowned out the sound of his own brain telling him that this was the Right thing to do, the Manly thing to do, the Good thing to do. He’d always hated being wrong.

So they went on.

They lived their respective lives and they forgot about impromptu visits that meant more than they should have and phone calls and emails with so much subtext that one could barely read the actual words. Memories faded in the wake of Organic Chemistry classes and Advanced Physics lectures, but somehow the other’s face remained prevalent in each of their minds, tattooed permanently on the inside of both eyelids. They ignored little voices and they ignored the fact that sometimes, when everything was a bit too much, when weakness was so apparent, there was nothing more that either of them wanted to do than board a plane to SoCal or upstate New York and never leave again.

Practicality or fear or stupidity, or a stunningly arrayed mix of the three, stopped them each time. But the thought was always there, stagnant, dormant, and waiting for the right moment.

The right moment, they both think, older, wiser and more aware of exactly what they could be losing in this thing, this thing without a name or classification that has haunted them for seven long years, this thing that has given them one too many chances already, this thing that is the first and last thing that either of them want, the right moment is now.

She knows, somewhere, that there is nothing better that she could have done to help this along. Seven years’ worth of suppression and denial will not fade easily, but as he tells her a story, recounts his life to her in a way that makes her feel really special and not just some generic imitation of a person like she fears she is, all of that goes away for a while, and she things that if this is the way to keep the pain at bay, if he is the cure, then she will gladly be addicted.

It seems right, somehow, that she should be addicted to him, grossly unable to function alone, but it also seems wrong, because she knows now, in a way that escaped her at the naïve age of 15, that she is not the only one here developing a potentially life-threatening addiction. She is not the only one here who feels this, sees this. She is not the only one, but sometimes she thinks she is, and that feeling alone crushes her worse than any number of clumsy falls down staircases.

She fell into this, too, clumsily and unaccustomed to the world in which he lived, the grown-up world. She was 15 and too innocent for her own good and he was Older and Tall and Strong and Perfect and she fell so hard that she was surprised that the force of the landing didn’t kill her.

Or maybe she had just never landed. I’m landing now, she thinks, and braces herself for the impact.

And there they are, again, kicking leaves and laughing and catching up with seven years’ worth of things that couldn’t be said resting in the air between them. Their chemistry was as paradoxical as it was strong, and maybe, just maybe, through college degrees and graduate degrees and learning things that couldn’t be written on a blackboard, they could understand it now.

He smiles at her, terrified because he can, indeed, feel the shift in the air. He thinks fleetingly that California would be a much better setting for this, a much better setting for this complete turnover that will occur in the looming moments ahead. What they have, though, is Upstate New York in a nothing town that they both escaped but kept running back to, a nothing town that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave completely. What they have is a plane ticket from California to New York with intentions to grab onto the last chance they’ll ever have. What they have is something that has always alluded definition.

What they have, right now, is each other, and this time they will not let that go.

They come to a stop at a park, on a bench, and he sits and she leans against the railing and for a second it possesses a confusing sense of déjà vu until they both realize that this is how they started, seven years ago, and this is where they will either end or begin something new.

"I miss this place," he says, and he feels momentarily chagrined for disturbing its quiet peace. When she smiles, receptive and reassuring, he is appeased. All is right.

"Me too."

He cannot think of any words to say; words are not his forte. She is words, he is actions and together they make one whole.

Her gaze, cerulean, matching his to the exact shade, is direct. "You came to California."

He looks away, feeling weak and older than he really is in comparison to the unadulterated innocence that still shines in her eyes. "You came to New York."

She sighs heavily, feeling the weight of this impossibly heavy thing pressing on her back, and she wonders if he carries the same load that she does. "Kevin, we’ve danced around this for seven years-"

"I know." His voice is hushed, calm, appeasing. "I know. I’m sorry."

"We’ve-we’re-" Her head falls into her hands as she sinks down next to him at the table. "Do you have any idea what the hell is going on here?"

He is scared at her words, but it is fitting that she does not know, and that she thinks that he always knew, though he didn’t. "I think I do."

"I don’t." Startled at her own words, she looks up. "Explain it to me," in the voice she always used, the voice she used when she asked him a question, anticipating the answer because no one else understood things quite so closely as she did.

"We’re all grown up now, Anna." As if those words explained anything.

"Could have fooled me," she murmurs softly, but the wind carries the words straight to his ears.

"We can’t…we can’t still just run around each other, skirt the issue, come so close and pull away, we-" Frustrated, he slaps his palms to his face. "I don’t know. God, I have no idea."

Slowly, in a moment that lasted longer than it should have, she prepares her reply. "I do."

His hands cease their act of scrubbing the skin away from his eye sockets and he looks up, surprised. "What?"

"I have an idea."

He smiles fondly, remembering. "You always did."

She echoes his smile and begins to speak. "When we started, we were-it was too early. And then it was gone, and it was too late. Then we began again and that time we didn’t quit on it, but we didn’t act on it either. And then you came to California and we were always there for each other when everything was going to hell, and it just-it built up, I guess, and then I got my diploma and my best friend said to me, she said, ‘I’m so glad I have no regrets, aren’t you?’ and I couldn’t say yes, Kevin, because there was always you and I needed to come back here and we need to figure out what the hell this is, because I’m tired, I am so tired of standing still on the verge of something. I want to move forward, or even go backward, but I can’t keep running in circles with you anymore."

She draws a deep breath, and it would be comical if he weren’t in shock, because she has just said everything, and this next minute, he knows, will be the defining minute of his life. "I want to move forward too."

"Good." She smiles, a touch of hope and innocence, and he is lost. "Good."

Uncertain, her brow furrows and her hands ring themselves together as she stares anxiously at him. All of the cards must be laid on the table, she knows, face-up and easy to read. She has never been good at cutting herself open for others’ scrutiny, but she realizes that now is a good time to practice, because he needs it as much as she does.

She is scared but the words cannot be stopped so she adds as much confidence to them as she can muster and begins to speak.

"It’s been, since the first day, it’s been you, and you broke my heart more than once, but it’s always been you. No matter what happened, when I thought I had everything sorted out, you’d call me, write me, hop a plane to California, and you’d wreck my façade, and I’d have to start over again. But-" and she paused for breath and for thought because now she had to improvise, her speech was done-"but now, there’s no façade to wreck, because we’re too old for that, and because this thing with us isn’t going to wait for my insecurities or your worries for another day, it’s now or it’s never and I want now."

Shaking with fear and feeling more exposed than she would have liked, she quiets and stares at the table and waits for his response.

"I know…I know that ever since this started, you thought it was mostly you, but it wasn’t. Isn’t. I’m just better at hiding, I think. I’m in this as much as you are. And I can’t explain it or tell you why like I usually can, but I can tell you that I want now, too, and that I’m glad we got a last chance."

A pause, a deadly pause, and he trembles a bit at her silence because her tongue and lips were constantly busy with words and hearing her quiet was a thing to which he would never be accustomed.

"Okay," she says finally. "Good."

"Yes. Good."

And the wary look is back in her eyes, worried and scared. "We’re not done talking about this yet, you know."

His smiles is small and playful. "I know."

"There’s a lot more crap to be sorted through-"

"I know."

"If this is going to work-"

"Anna." She shut up, looking at him, still shaking, tears in her eyes. "I know, Anna. It’ll be okay. We can do this."

"Okay," she squeaks, and she would be supremely embarrassed by it if it were not so pathetically trivial in this moment.

"Okay." It is final, the way he says it, a confirmation of things that were too vague for words. He reaches out his hand, deeming it his turn to take a first move, and without hesitation, she places her own hand into his grip. Fingers intertwining, the grip is solid and firm before somehow their hands are disengaged and his arms are around her waist and her arms are around his neck and they are clinging, hanging on for dear life. Her head rests against his heart as it beats and she can hear the rhythm of that, and of his breathing, and she feels so content that she could fall asleep if her nerve ends were not buzzing with fireworks at his proximity. He is ecstatic, short of breath and heart racing, to have her there, finally, after words unsaid and surfing lessons that meant so much more than they should have and not enough at the same time, to have not lost her despite their many respective screw-ups.

The embrace lasts for long minutes longer than they had allowed any previous embrace, and he thinks, the ending will be different this time as he pulls away a little to see her, nestled against him and sighing quietly, contently.

She looks up, and if there had been any resistance in him at the moment it would have lost to his distinct and familiar need to kiss this amazing, innocent, prolix girl who had always been there, right below the surface in his mind, waiting for this moment. They had kissed before, and more than that, in their less than fine moments, weak and vulnerable with heightened emotions in a Californian dorm, but never had it been so weighted.

He lowers his head to touch his lips to hers and his eyes close as he is surrounded with warmth and comfort and a sensation of complete perfection. The kiss is light and sweet and soft, and as they pull back, he rests his forehead to hers, breath coming in spurts and blood rushing faster than it ever had in the wake of the simple kiss. He rests his lips on her cheek, unable to stop touching her just yet.

"Thank you," he whispers, and feels tears flood his eyes. He doesn’t know whom he is thanking, but he has an idea, and that idea is everyone who he has ever known for leading him to this moment. The fireworks still buzzing, he opens his eyes, and, as a tear leaks out, she kisses it away, displaying more finesse than she usually possessed.

"I love you," she whispers, because it’s her turn and because it needs to be said. It’s quiet, and almost lost in the wind, but the wind carries it right to his ears like it always has.

"I love you too," he whispers back, and they both hold on tighter, not willing to relinquish that newfound privilege just yet.

And right then, in that very moment, that small cross-section of the seven years leading up to it, fear faded to solace and relief and shells and plane tickets and surfboards that were milemarkers, souvenirs of their past instead of hope for their future.

They had kept coming back to this, back to the very core of their beings, back to the town the called ‘home’ because they had never known anything else, but at that small passage of time, they knew they would never leave home again, because home was no longer a nothing city in upstate New York that drew them both beyond their control, home was each other, and neither was willing to let that go.