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The end of term was last week, I’ve just been hanging around under the pretense of cleaning up the space. I have the next two months off, which I feel like I’ll need, even if I don’t join everyone at the B&B. I’m still undecided. I know what I want to do, but I’m not sure if it’s the most sensible decision. I don’t know how deep into all this mess I really want to get.
I wonder if Micah would talk it through with me, I could use the advice and thoughts of my best friend. Not to mention, I’m curious about how he’s feeling with all of it. I can’t pretend I’m not jealous of the way he looks at her, but maybe that’s only because he will barely look at me at all. And if I’m not trying to talk about “us”, maybe it’ll get him to talk to me.
We open the doors of my dark red sedan and climb in, and I adjust the vents to allow the air conditioning to hit us both. At first the drive is silent as we pull out of the parking lot and head through the small historic part of town.
Micah blows out a breath.
“Crazy day.” I nod, but don’t say anything. I’m hoping my silence will encourage him to keep talking. Maybe pushing him to talk was making things worse and pushing him farther away.
“It feels like we’ve been at the hospital for a week instead of a day.”
I let out a little laugh of agreement.
The silence stretches out between us, full of so many things left unsaid. It’s almost suffocating, and I struggle not to fill it with my usual anxious chatter.
Right as I’ve given up hope, Micah opens up. “I, uh… I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you. I’m not trying to be mean, I just… I don’t know what to say.”
His pain is evident, and it becomes more obvious that our separation and his avoidance have actually hurt him too. Knowing that flips something inside me. I need to change the subject, for his sake, and mine.
“So, you’re definitely going tomorrow?” I ask, knowing the answer but needing a segue into this other completely different, but also equally intense, conversation we need to have. He responds affirmatively, like I knew he would, but I gently push for more information. “What are your thoughts on the whole thing?”
“I don’t know, man… I feel like it’s something I need to do. There’s something about her, she’s special or something.” He looks at me knowingly. “I know you see it too.”
I’m not going to lie to him. “I see… something. But I don’t know what it is, and that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like all of the unknowns in the situation-”
He cuts me off with a light laugh, “And you want to analyze it to death, find a scientific answer to help you explain how you’re feeling.” We’ve had this conversation before.
There’s another silence where I think we’re both remembering that night, our talk in the car on the way to my place.
We were sitting next to each other in this same vehicle, our hands on the center console brushing against each other. Our fingers were rubbing gently together, flirting with the idea of holding hands. Even this innocent touch sent little tingles of electricity up my arms and down my spine. Gooseflesh broke out over my arms despite the overwhelming warmth of the car.
“How long have you known?” He asked me. I knew he was asking me about how long I’d known about my feelings for him.
“A while,” I admitted. “Maybe from the first day, but it took me a while to come to terms with it. I might have… overanalyzed it a bit in the beginning.”
He snickered. It was my M.O. to research anything and everything.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked through my own chuckles.
“I’m just imagining what your Google search history looked like.”
We both exploded into a fit of laughter. At some point, our hands linked firmly together, the tension broken, and fear replaced by the realization that we were still the same friends we’d always been, just… more now.
“Yeah, Google isn’t helping much, but I’ve considered hitting up the college library for PTSD research.” I don’t hide my smirk, enjoying our lighter banter.
“You’re not even joking, are you?” He laughs even harder and, much like that night, all the tension releases and we are simply us again.
Realizing that we’ve made it to Micah’s parents’ neighborhood, I pull the car over to the same spot I always used to drop him off at. He never did feel comfortable telling his parents about us, and was terrified they might suspect, so he always had me drop him off or pick him up in this same spot so they wouldn’t see me.
Micah realizes where we are, and his face pulls into a frown. “I know this isn’t fair to you. It never was, and I’m sorry. A lot happened that I never told you, and I just ran. I cut myself off from you completely because I didn’t think I’d be strong enough. That isn’t an excuse for how I treated you.”
I stare at the steering wheel, trying to keep my composure. The backs of my eyes are stinging with tears, and the exhaustion of the past day is making it harder to hold myself together. I’m afraid that if I get too emotional, he’ll shut down again. I’m afraid to speak, or look at him, or breathe too deeply.
“They found out. They’d suspected for a while, but they saw some stuff on my phone that made it pretty clear what was going on. My mother wouldn’t look at me, and my father flipped out.” He takes a deep breath. I tilt my head towards him to indicate that I’m listening, but I still don’t look him in the eye.
He continues, “There had been an incident at the hospital, I still don’t know the specifics of it but I think he made a mistake during surgery. I guess the pressure of what he was going through paired with the reality of what I was – it unhinged him. He made me box him.” He pauses and my heart hurts for him, realizing how traumatic that would have been. “And then they shipped me out the next day. I felt all this weight of responsibility for what they were going through, and I just… I cracked, man. I bowed to what they wanted, and I’ve been walking a thin line every day since.”
Micah’s parents had always put a lot of pressure and responsibility on his shoulders. From a young age, they forced him into multiple sports, taking all the hardest classes, pushing him to work harder, do more, be more. It was like they, most of all his father, expected him to be super-human. It hurt watching it then, and it hurts now seeing how much it affected him.
