Two thirty in the morning on New Year’s, and I was the most sober but least safe driver on the road. Through a wall of tears, I navigated clumsily down the winding road, zigzagging up the narrow hill and down the gravelly slope of the driveway. I screamed at the windshield, and nearly turned around a handful of times because I almost couldn’t believe my own memory. The two of them lying there.

I didn’t look at Elliot’s house as I vaulted up the front steps, afraid I would pound on the door, demand that he come downstairs, even though I knew he wasn’t there.

I didn’t know much in that moment, but I knew I couldn’t make it back to Berkeley in one piece.

Inside, the house was ice cold. Wood was neatly stacked in the back pallet—I could make a fire, have something to eat to settle the grinding in my gut—but I could barely make it to the couch. I pulled a blanket from the back of the easy chair and curled up on the floor.

Honestly, I don’t remember anything else but the feel of the cold floor along the right side of my body. I think my brain must have shut down immediately. Some self-preservation instinct didn’t want me to see his naked hips anymore, see the familiar press of her hand to his navel. Some protective piece of my mind didn’t want to recall the thick smell of that room—the cloud of bodies, and sweat, and beer, and sex—or the casual way Christian referenced their intimate history.

But was he right? Had that been what it was like all week long, and for most of their lives? Emma and Elliot, casually hooking up, filling the tedium of their days with each other? Texting each other to hang when there was nothing else to do. Hooking up at the park because—why not? I had no doubt that Elliot loved me—I knew he did, felt it in the marrow of my bones—but I was there barely a third of the time, and the other two-thirds, there was Emma. Every day at school, all year long: accessible, convenient, familiar.

I had no idea who Real-Life Elliot was. My Elliot existed only on certain days, only in the confines of our library closet.

I don’t know him at all. I don’t know him at all. That was the horrible thought that threaded through my dreams—dreams of running into him on a bus and not recognizing him, dreams of passing him in the hall and feeling the uncomfortable echo that I’d somehow missed something important but didn’t know what it was.

now

sunday, december 31

I shift my hips up, feeling the clench in my chest when Elliot’s body slips from mine. I feel him retreat beneath me, his eyes filled with an ache that seems to build the longer we’re silent.