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“We should probably go.”
He nodded and got up to pay.
I stayed there awhile sitting on the patio, trying to figure out what I was feeling. It was like floating in the middle of nowhere, in limbo, in a place at once vague but very alive, full of contrasts, fears, longings, things impossible to understand.
Oliver respected my silence while we walked back. When we reached a street I knew well, I stopped. “You mind if I walk myself home?”
“Doesn’t Blair live here?”
“Yeah. I need to talk to her.”
“Sure. Gimme a kiss.”
He bent over to reach my cheek and then walked off at a rapid clip. I waited awhile in the same place until I got the courage to knock. Ms. Anderson opened up, surprised until compassion got the better of her and her dark eyes turned pitying. I looked down; I couldn’t bear to watch that grief welling in them.
“Dear, it’s so nice to see you here! It’s been so long since…” She didn’t finish the phrase before stepping aside. “Blair’s in her room. You want anything? A juice? A coffee?”
“Thanks but no.”
She pointed the way to her daughter’s room. I walked down the hall a bundle of nerves.
My pulse was pounding. So many happy moments I’d lived there…
I sucked in a breath and opened the door.
When Blair saw me, she brought her hand to her heart.
“I can’t believe it!” She smiled and struck her pinky finger jumping out of bed to come toward me. “Ow! God damn it! It’s nothing. Pain is just mental, isn’t that what they say? Come in, sit down. Everything okay? Did something happen? Because if you need anything, you know…yeah, you know.”
“I don’t need anything. I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”
I felt like I was spending all my days saying sorry. But I felt so guilty, so bad, so poisonous… I knew I was hurting all the people I cared about, and even still, I couldn’t help it, because the alternative was too…just too much, period.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because of what happened at the festival.”
“Don’t be an idiot. I was happy you decided to go.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten drunk and I shouldn’t have put you in a bind.”
Blair waved it off. “Forget about it. The important thing is you were there.”
“Thanks for being the way you are,” I whispered.
I sat at the foot of her bed, close to her. I looked around the room, stopping at the photos of the two of us and of other friends all over the corkboard hanging over her desk, next to a painting I had done for her for her birthday that showed her delicate outline against a shifting sea. For me, Blair had always been like that, the calm amid the chaos. The calm inside me. Once, my father told me we all need an anchor, and in a way, she was that for me.
“Next time we’ll do something chill,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s probably better. I don’t know what was up with me.”
“How do you mean?”
And I don’t know if it was because I didn’t know what else to say before I left, if it was the nostalgia in her eyes, or if it was just that the moment we were living through was so strange, but I blurted it out, head swimming, throat dry as a bone: “I got naked in front of him.”
“What?”
“In front of Axel. And I kissed him.”
