The summer is long, humid. Her hair frizzes out uncontrollably in the Brooklyn heat and his building’s air conditioning goes out completely just at the height of June. She pulls her hair back in messy buns. He buys a box fan that sits in his living room.
“I miss you.”
He stands in the middle of his living room when he talks to her on the phone that first night away. He tells her what he had for dinner and what he watched on TV and how now he’s just standing in his living room not sure what he’s supposed to do because this is the part where she usually kisses him slyly and he comes undone.
She absently draws his hands in a new sketchbook while he talks. By the time he’s done, she’s filled ten pages and finds herself telling him maybe he can still come undone.
“Gas is expensive, save your money. I’ll take the train down next weekend, okay?”
At night it’s still too hot for anything but skin and cool cotton sheets. He listens to the thunder rolling, rattling the windows in their frames and he thinks about the curves of her body. Then the rain starts.
The next morning, he wakes up to an email from her. A picture of her standing in the rain on the steps outside of the Met, grinning and waving at the camera in a purple rain coat with the hood up. The only text is, ‘LOVE YOU.’
“Scranton’s mostly the same. How’s city life?”
He prints out a copy of the picture and tapes it to his monitor at work. Her eyes are bright and green and peeking through all rain and clouds and concrete. He leaves her five messages while she’s in her classes that day. They say everything and nothing at the same time.
He leaves the last one as he drives home that night. Stopped at a red light with the sunlight fading slow, he simply tells her, ‘Listen, this is just turning out to be a lot harder than I thought.’
“Hello?”
He calls her one night and she’s on a subway car. He gets half of a liquored greeting before she’s cut off. When his eyes close, she’s in a black dress and she’s wearing glittering eye shadow and those heels he’s only seen her wear once at home when he asked her to put them on. He hears them clicking against city sidewalks until his phone finally rings sometime after two in the morning.
She’s still a little bit drunk when she calls and she’s saying, ‘Sorry, Audrey and I were out celebrating a little ‘cause we’ve made it halfway through the program and- You’re not upset, are you? ‘Cause I was thinking we could do some celebrating of our own…’
“What time does your train come in?”
When she comes for the weekend after two weekends that felt like a lifetime, he doesn’t let her go. He fills himself up on her laughter and her skin. Late at night, he pulls the covers over their heads and they stay awake talking in the close, quiet dark. When it’s light out again, he pushes the covers back down and tells her, ‘I don’t know if I can let you go again.’
He spends Sunday preparing. She packs up her weekend bag with him standing behind her in the bedroom doorway. She walks up to him, bag in one hand, the other on his chest. She kisses him firmly, ‘Just another month.’ He kisses her again, because his only response to that is that it’s still too long and she’s still too far away.
“Marry me.”
At the train station, as the four o’clock to New York comes roaring into the station, he grabs her hand when she stands up from the dirty bench they were waiting on, the wind from the train blowing her hair around her head and her skirt around her knees. She looks at him, her eyes wide and watery. He tells her over the noise from the train and all the people, ‘I’m in this forever. When you’re going away for so long, I just think you should be sure of that.’
He doesn’t have the ring, but she shakes her head like it doesn’t matter and pulls on the hem of his t-shirt until his lips are close to hers. ‘I’m in this forever, too,’ and she kisses him once before getting on the train. He watches the train until it disappears completely and the station is quiet again.
“How many more days until you come home for good again?”
August is somehow even slower, somehow even more hot and humid. The month seems to last three or four or maybe an entire year. She doesn’t come home at all on weekends, busy with assignments and portfolios and all those things that he’s grown so proud of. When he calls, she’s rarely able to actually talk except for maybe three times a week when he catches her on a lazy Saturday afternoon or when she’s allowing herself a break from working.
None of it seems to matter though because it’s like they’ve got this secret between them now and it makes their smiles stretch over phone lines and state lines and through all those calendar days. He feels indestructible and he can hear that same feeling in her voice.
He keeps the ring open on his dresser and waits for her to come home.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Title and epigraph from the song Think I Wanna Die by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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