I look up at the darkened cottage from the bottom step. It’s two a.m. and my feet ache. My back aches. My heart aches. The euphoric sounds of the afterparty drift down the hill and I wrap myself up in it. It’ll be a memory soon.
I climb up another step of the cottage. Our cottage. I watched Eli all night—holding the mic as he gave his wedding speech; chatting with Nick and Miriam, who came up for the wedding; watching me as I chatted with them; out on the dance floor as we circled each other. I told myself not to get too close, but I ended up in his arms anyway during the last song.
We didn’t say anything; the music was astronomically loud, and I said goodbye, watching the tiny hairs rise on his neck. He couldn’t hear me, but maybe his body understood the word. His hold on me tightened, and I swear hours later I can still feel the pressure of his fingertips.
My hand is on the door handle now and I’m thinking about goodbyes. The one we’ll all have to say tomorrow. The one I’ll have to say when I leave for Seattle. The one I gave Eli earlier, and the ones we had before that wrecked me equally: when I left for Cal Poly freshman year and it sunk in that I wouldn’t see him every day. The goodbye he ripped out of me the night we called it done, and the one I left him on one of his Post-it notepads when I moved out because he didn’t want to be there to watch me go.
I never want to say goodbye to him is the thing. That’s the problem. It’s why I’m here, because I don’t want to hear him say it out loud, and yet I have to say goodbye to this week somehow—what we did, how we’ve shaped the word us into something that still hurts, but that I can at least touch.
Once inside, I sit on the loveseat and look around, not bothering to turn on the light. I know this place by heart. I see every corner Eli and I have inhabited—the kitchenette where we nearly kissed after rescuing Adam’s ring, this loveseat where he had his panic attack and let me see it, the bed
where we were messy and real. I go back further, turn over memories from the past five years. Longer than that. I think about hellos and goodbyes, beginnings and endings. I imagine an endless circle that brings me back to one feeling again and again and again: loving him.
Outside, a wood step creaks. My eyes fly open. I don’t know how long I’ve been thinking about Eli, other than forever, but there are footsteps. They’re steady and measured. My heart doesn’t know whether to fly or dive.
Then the door opens and Eli’s there. Tall, beautiful, rumpled. He wears moonlight like a crown; it traces its fingertips down his body, silhouetting him.
It’s that circle. Time bending back to the last goodbye we had. He’s still in the doorway, but it’s our Upper West Side apartment. It’s December five years ago, close to midnight. I’m wearing a dress, but this one is short and black with long sleeves. I’m sitting on our couch in the dark, hands folded in my lap. I walked home from my company’s holiday party at the Empire Hotel because I had to burn off some of my emotions, but my legs aren’t even cold anymore. That’s how long I’ve been waiting.
“What are you doing here?” he asks then, breathlessly, with a potent mix of exasperation and fear.
Fear because it’d been fifty-eight days since I’d asked him to do anything with me other than grocery shop; I counted. My company’s holiday party was tonight and I finally capitulated two days ago, asked him to find a way to make it because I didn’t want to go alone. Five years ago me loathes my job by this point—my passive-aggressive boss, the friends who make that word mean something lonely, the sly jokes about how Eli must have a secret second family. I thought all night about how all he wants is one whole one. It’s what he’s working so hard toward, and it’s what we’re ruining in our pressure cooker of silence and anxiety and disappointment.
He’s exasperated, probably, because it’s clear by the way his dress shirt is clinging to his chest that he ran to the hotel, or back home when he saw I wasn’t there. But I’d already been there for nearly three hours, alone in a ballroom full of people, staring at the fake Christmas tree and six-foot-tall
menorah across the way, feeling the same way I did in kindergarten when my dad couldn’t make it to that holiday concert. At six, I looked out into the audience and didn’t have a touchstone. At twenty-three, it was the same. I sat through dinner, endured conversations with people I can’t stand, ignoring those knowing looks, ignoring the single text he sent at 10:07.
I thought about the end until I got up and left without saying goodbye. I drafted my resignation email on the walk home.
And when I got home, I imagined a pile of bricks. Each brick was a time he’d fucked up or I had, a time when either one of us could’ve said what was on our mind and said nothing instead. It was endless tiny transgressions that didn’t ruin us in the moment but added to the wall we built.
On this night in December five years ago, I see how tall it is. How unclimbable.
He’s afraid because he sees the wall, too. He’s exasperated because he’s so tired that he thought today was Thursday, not Friday. He didn’t not show up, he says, he just didn’t realize. I never texted to ask where he was, and never responded to the one he sent saying he was coming.
He’s afraid because I didn’t wait. Because, on this night five years ago, I tell him, “I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.”
Five-years-ago Eli stares at me for a long moment. In my dreams sometimes it’s hours. And then he says, devastated, “I know.”
Now, as he steps over the threshold of our cottage, closing the door behind him, I think about how I could’ve yelled that night. I could’ve laid out every ugly thing that I was feeling. But I still would’ve walked away, and it would’ve been rubble instead of something that, five years later, can be rebuilt in a different way.
If we’re careful.
“What are you doing here?” Eli asks now, but there’s no fear, just that godforsaken determination.
I don’t want a messy goodbye. I’m so tired of those. “What are you
doing here?”
“I came to—” He cuts himself off with a wave of his hand. He’s clutching his phone, along with a Post-it notepad and a pen. “You first.”
I nod my chin at him. “Conducting some important business that couldn’t wait?”
The joke lands flat; he’s been so present here. Nothing has been more important than what we’ve done this week. But I’m too caught in the web of our past and the fact that this whole thing is about to go pumpkin-shaped. “Sorry,” I murmur, wiping my sweating palms down my thighs as I
stand up. “That was— I’m sorry.”
He nods. Steps closer. “What are you doing here?”
“Came to say goodbye.” It’s the truth wrapped in an innocuous statement. “It’s been quite the week and this cottage deserves a moment of silence, especially since I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”
“It has been quite the week.” Another step. He’s five feet away, close enough that I can smell the rain on his skin. “I hoped you’d be here. I lost you over by the Slip ’N Slide.”
“Keeping tabs on me?” It’s an echo of a few nights ago, right before we went swimming. Just before we gave in.
“Always,” he says quietly, but this time it’s not teasing.
“If you thought I’d be here, why’d you ask what I was doing here?” “Just wanted to hear you say it.”
“That’s very tricky of you,” I get out.
One corner of his mouth picks up, then straightens. I see the resolve there. I see what he wants. “Georgia—”
“I don’t want to talk,” I interrupt.
He moves closer, and there—there’s the exasperation. “You don’t even know what I want to say.”
“Yes, I do,” I state, circling the coffee table so I’m that much closer to the door.
I want to talk about New York. The night you told me you were done. Why we didn’t fight for each other. Nick and Miriam’s wedding. My job. This week and what we did.
It’s all been sitting at the base of my throat for days, some of it for years, and I feel it rising in me like a wave.
He huffs out a breath. He doesn’t even try to follow me; that lock-click gaze is enough to stop me. “Then just let me say it.”
“First of all,” I huff back, “you’re breaking the agreement.”
“With all due respect to the agreement, fuck the agreement. Also, the week is over.” His voice lowers. It’s nearly a caress. “I told you we were going to have a reckoning, Georgia. That I’ve spent too long not saying the things I want to say, and I’m done not saying them.”
“God, why?” I burst out. “What good will it do?”
“A whole hell of a lot more good than not talking has done us.” I shake my head. “No.”
He takes a step. “Yes.”
The wave is growing—need and fear and panic and anger. “We’re just getting back to a good place after five years of hell. For me, at least.”
Something ignites in his eyes and I realize it’s the first time I’ve ever said anything like that out loud.
“For me, too,” he says.
“Right,” I implore. “Right, and now it feels okay, doesn’t it? This week has been good, hasn’t it?”
“It’s been—” His voice breaks, and his expression does, too. Under the determination is an emotion I’ve seen flashes of all week: hunger. “It’s been everything.”
“Yes, and we’re becoming friends again.”
Eli paces away, scrubbing his hands over his face with a wild groan.
I push on, desperate. “I don’t want to wreck that, so why are you pushing this so hard? Why does it matter?”
I thought I knew what the reckoning would be, but when he turns on his heel and stalks back to me, I’m in no way prepared for what he actually says.
He stops just short of me, a flame in his eyes. No, not a flame—a wildfire.
“It matters,” he says, his voice breaking, “because I’m in love with you.”
