Chapter Eight
I’d had a few boyfriends before I met Bryan, but none of them serious. I was the artsy girl growing up, so I was always drawn to those types too, and went out with a dark-haired hipster guy who inked comic books when I was a junior in high school, then to senior prom with a totally beautiful golden boy who looked like the quarterback but wrote like a poet, including a sonnet for me tucked inside the corsage.
I liked them both, but they didn’t compare to Bryan. They didn’t come close in any department, not in my heart, and definitely not in the kissing division. Any girl who says she doesn’t keep a list of best kisses ever is lying. She may not have a pen-and-paper list, but she knows in her head who rocked her world and made her more than weak in the knees. Bryan was my butterflies-in-the-belly, my soft-and-hungry-and-neverending kisses. He was all the kisses I’d ever want. Because he was kind, and he was witty, and he always wanted to know more about me, and maybe that’s why he kissed like a dream – he was my dream guy.
One summer night Bryan and I went to the water and stretched out on a blanket on the sand. As I ran my hands over his chest and his stomach, he made this noise, like a low growl and a sigh all in one, and I wanted to pull his perfect body to mine and move against him.
“We can’t do more than kiss,” he said as my fingers explored the underside of his tee-shirt while the midnight waves rolled along the beach, then back out to the ocean.
“Why?”
“Because. Because I’m your brother’s friend. Because I’m older than you.”
“You’re only five years older,” I pointed out.
“I know. But you’re seventeen.”
“So? I’m old enough to know what I want.”
“I know, and I want it too. But it’s wrong.”
“Would it be wrong then when I’m eighteen?”
I looped my hands around his back and wriggled my hips closer. From the feel of him against me, I doubted it would be wrong. I was sure it would only be right.
“Kat.”
“Would it be wrong when I’m eighteen?” I repeated, bringing my lips to his, and running my fingers across his smooth, strong back. He shuddered under my touch, and I felt powerful. I felt wanted. I felt like the girl who was becoming irresistible to the boy.
“No.”
“So then…” I let my voice trail off. He was leaving for New York in a week to start his job. I was starting school a month later. Nervous hope clanged inside me. “I’m going to be in New York soon too. I’m going to NYU.”
“I know, and you’re going to love it. But my job is going to take me out of town a lot,” he said, and my heart sank. I wanted to be more than his summer love. Summer romances, by definition, are bittersweet. They have an expiration date. “Don’t be sad, Kat. I’m totally falling for you, and I don’t want to take advantage of you. I like you that much.”
That made me smile and feel better about the possibility of an us, even though it seemed like grasping at the edge of a cloud.
A few days later, we were at the movies again, and I kept thinking about what he’d said about falling for me. I was falling for him too, and then some. Age difference or not, brother’s best friend or not, I wanted him to know. I wanted to put it out there, obstacles be damned. After the credits rolled, and the lights came up, and we were the only ones still in the theater except for an usher cleaning the front rows, I looked in his green eyes, took a breath, and said, “I’m falling for you too.”
He smiled, the kind that only spelled happiness, and pressed his forehead to mine. “Kat, will you come visit me in New York next month?”
I was a pinwheel of colors. I was the winner at the carnival. The boy I wanted wanted me. “Of course.”
And so we made plans. I’d take the train in on weekends to visit him, and we’d do all those things young couples do in New York. Walk through the Village holding hands, kiss by the fountain at Lincoln Center, bring a picnic to Central Park and find the most secluded spot. Then, when I turned eighteen at the end of the summer, we’d do more. We’d do everything. He would be my first, and there was no question I’d waited for the right guy.
We went to a restaurant in Little Italy the first weekend, and he touched my legs under the red-checked tablecloth the whole time, sending me into the most heated state. When we left, I pulled him against me and we made out in front of a closed hardware store next door, not caring who was walking past us.
Another time, we spent the afternoon in the Impressionist galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, where I showed him my favorite Monet, one of haystacks in the snow. He said he liked the way the artist crafted shadows in the sun. Then, Bryan pointed at the folds on a dress in a Renoir and mused that they seemed like diamonds. I looked at him, at the way his green eyes studied the painting, and it all seemed too good to be true – here I was with someone who was gorgeous, and funny, and who actually liked looking at art – but yet, it was true.
The next weekend he said he’d found the perfect store for me, and he brought me to a cobblestoned block in the Village and held open the door to a tiny little Japanese manga shop. I gave him a quizzical look. I wasn’t into manga.
“Just go in. You’ll see.”
After I passed the shelves of comics, I saw the most fantastic display. A wall full of Hello Kitty jewelry – bracelets and rings and hair clips and necklaces and keychains and every adornment imaginable with the cat.
Bryan was smiling, as if he’d brought me to buried treasure. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.” A nervous grin came next. “But then again, you make such amazing stuff this might all seem silly to you.”
I placed my hand on his arm. “I love it. No matter what I make, I will always love Hello Kitty. It’s a life-long kind of thing we have going on.”
“Good. Pick anything you like.”
I studied the displays, checking out a rhinestone necklace, a white and pink pendant, a silver and black chain. Then rings in all shapes and sizes. I showed him a cute, sparkly ring. “I do love this ring.”
I moved over to the necklaces. Bryan shifted closer and slipped his hand onto the small of my back, touching me underneath my tee-shirt. I closed my eyes because it felt so good I wanted to purr. The slightest touch from him was intoxicating.
“One more week until your birthday,” he whispered.
I leaned into him, savoring the feel of his body against me. That we were in a public place barely crossed my mind. All I could think of was him.
The girl behind the counter cleared her throat. I opened my eyes and managed to choose a sparkly number, with pink stones for the cat’s ears. It was kitschy and that’s what made it so adorable.
“Wait for me outside,” Bryan said.
I did as instructed and a minute later, he left the store, dropped a tiny white bag into his wallet, and then fastened the chain around my neck. “It’s just a little necklace, but I wanted you to have something from me. Something you liked,” he said, and he sounded so sweet and nervous too.
“I love it, Bryan. I totally love it.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Then, his hands were in my hair, and he kissed my neck, my earlobe, my eyelids. I sighed and swayed closer. I was floating, I was flying, I was in Manhattan with the man I’d fallen in mad, crazy love with.
“Why aren’t we just in your apartment right now?” I whispered.
“Because if we are, I will not be able to resist you.”
“You’re not doing a good job resisting me right now.”
“I know. Can you even imagine what it’ll be like if it’s just you and me?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I can imagine. I think about it all the time. I’m so crazy about you. I want to be with you in every way.”
“Me too. Let’s go walk around NYU. You’re going to be there in just a few weeks.” He held my hand and squeezed my fingers when he said that, his touch a visceral reminder that we’d be together then. We wandered around the campus for the next hour, and with each building, dorm and classroom that we managed to find open in August, I grew more excited about college.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be here soon. It’s going to be amazing.” We walked along the outside of one of the dorms. “Did you love it here?”
“Yes. I loved it. College is everything they say it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s the time when you find yourself. When you figure out what you want. And when you have a ton of fun.”
“I can’t wait to start. I know I’m going to love it.”
“You are,” Bryan said, but there was something sad in his tone.
I looked at him. “Hey. You okay?”
“Totally.”
“Because you sounded…”
“I’m fine.”
But he grew quieter as we checked out the campus bookstore, and a cafe where I said I would probably do all my homework, and the library, which was speckled with students for the summer session. His mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t tell me where he’d gone.
At the station on Sunday night, I thanked him again for the necklace.
“You should always wear it,” he said before I caught the last train to Mystic. His voice was wistful, and when he kissed me goodbye, the moment had become melancholy. I didn’t feel like a girl who was returning in a week for her eighteenth birthday. I felt like a girl being sent off with only a Hello Kitty necklace to remember him by.
When I called a few days later to confirm our weekend plans, his voice was different. Strained and distant.
“I don’t think you should come in,” he said.
Something didn’t compute. We’d been planning this weekend for more than a month. “Why? Did something come up at work?” My shoulders started to tighten with worry.
“No. It’s just…I don’t think we should.”
“Should what?”
There were so many ways to answer the question, but the scariest one was the one he said next.
“I don’t think we should be together.”
I looked at my phone briefly as if it were a radio, mistakenly tuned to a channel I could no longer understand. I brought the phone to my ear and said the only thing I could think of. The thing I was clinging to. “But I’m totally in love with you, Bryan. One hundred percent and then some. And I want to be with you.”
Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
Words didn’t come.
The silence choked me. It was as if hands were on my neck, gripping me.
How could I have misread him so badly? He’d said he was falling for me. Where else do you fall but in love?
Then he spoke, and his words were sharp glass. “I have to go.”
Breaking the clasp in a single, fierce pull, I ripped off the necklace, then tossed it into the trash, stuffing it at the bottom of the can.
That was the last time I spoke to him.
Even now, five years later, those words rang through me. I could hear them, the pause before he spoke, the shape of each and every syllable. I have to go.
That’s exactly what he did. He left.