Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

When she doesn’t find him by the car, Clare walks back around to the side of the building, where Aidan is sitting on the curb, his head bent over his phone. There’s a faint rotten smell coming from the nearby trash bins, blown in their direction by the rain: a fine, clinging mist that feels good after the closeness of the bowling alley.

Clare stands over him for a few seconds, but when he doesn’t show any sign of acknowledging her, she finally joins him on the curb, leaving a few inches between them.

“I’m sorry,” she says, tilting her head to look at him. “I didn’t know it still bothered you.”

Aidan laughs, but there’s nothing funny in the sound of it. “That you don’t love me?”

“That I don’t say it.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s not,” she insists, as she’s done so many times before. “You know how I feel about you.”

“See,” he says, “that’s the problem. Maybe I don’t.”

“Aidan.”

“No wonder you think we should break up,” he says, his eyes flashing with anger. “If you can’t say it now, you probably never will.”

“I’ve told you,” she says, grinding the heels of her hands against her eyes, already feeling defeated by an argument she’s never going to win. “I don’t want to say it unless it’s—”

“True?” he asks. “Real?”

She shakes her head, frustrated. “Unless it’s forever.”

“Right,” he says, looking hurt. “And this isn’t. Message received.”

They’re both silent after that, and Clare closes her eyes. She’d give just about anything not to be talking about this. Not tonight. Not when they only have so many hours left. Especially since she knows the only thing she can say to make it better is the one thing she still can’t bring herself to voice.

For a long time, Aidan hadn’t seemed to mind. Shortly after he’d first said it—right here at the bowling alley—they’d spent an afternoon at an art museum downtown. There was a special Picasso exhibition, and Clare had stopped to study a painting of a child holding a white dove.

“Looks like true dove to me,” Aidan had joked, coming up behind her.

“Definitely dove at first sight.”

“You know what I dove? Paintings of doves.”

She smiled. “Oh, yeah?”

“And actual doves,” he said as she turned, slipping her arms around his neck. “Who doesn’t dove doves, right?”

“I dove you,” she’d said, rising onto her tiptoes to kiss him.

And for a while, that had been enough.

I dove you, Clare had said a week later, the words bubbling up inside her as she watched him scramble around on the floor of the grocery store after his bag of apples had split open. I dove you, she’d shouted above the noise, after he’d kissed her in the wild, celebratory aftermath of a lacrosse win, and she’d said it again during the quiet moment just before they parted on an ordinary Tuesday night in her driveway.

I dove you, I dove you, I dove you.

It was just one letter off, but to Clare, it came from the same place. Swapping out a D for an L shouldn’t have mattered—not when all the right feelings were there—but for some reason, it did. It felt safer, somehow, less permanent. Because love wasn’t something you could take back. It was like a magic spell: Once you said the words, they were simply out there, shifting and changing everything that had once been true.

All her life, Clare has watched her parents pass the word back and forth as if it weren’t a fragile object, as if it were the sturdiest thing in the world. They’ve never been content to say it just once. “I love love love you,” her dad calls to her mom each morning as he walks out the door, and she always yells it back to him the same way: “I love love love you.”