* * * *

It was a while before Connie finally came out. Her eyes—those beautiful eyes—were red-rimmed and heavy. She didn’t look at me as she sat down next to me on the porch, leaving enough distance in the space between us that we might well have been strangers waiting together at a bus stop. I didn’t want to look at her either, in truth. I didn’t want to look at the face I knew better than my own and see what was written so plainly across it, etched into the lines of her skin. I didn’t want to look at her and see that she no longer belonged to me—realize that she had never belonged to me. I never before thought that I could feel so empty, or that a person could feel such nothingness.

“She isn’t going to tell,” she finally managed to say. Her voice still quivered, hoarse after all the crying.

“That’s good.”

Connie nodded.

Another moment trickled by in silence.

I knew the answer long before there was any need to ask the question. “It’s over, isn’t it?” I asked her gently.

A fresh set of tears welled up. “She isn’t going to tell,” she repeated, “and I know we said—we said before that we’d stay friends, but—she said we can’t. She said she’d tell—”

I forced myself to smile, somehow. Looking back, I often wondered why, exactly, I stayed so calm. Every dream I held slipped out of my grasp that afternoon but I did no more to show it than shed a few salty tears and murmur a few silent curses at a God I didn’t believe in. I watched as everything I held dear edged just beyond my reach and made no effort to save it. But I know, now, that I just wanted to be strong for her.

How cruel it should be that everything I ever did belonged to Connie, was done out of unknowing devotion to her. Even my very emotions were not my own but subject, always, to her. I swallowed back every word that bubbled up in my throat. “It’s probably better, you know. In the long term. It’ll be better for us that we just end it now.”

But she shook her head then, and the hands that hung at her sides curled up into small fists. “You have to understand—I don’t want it to end, Alex. I don’t want—”

“But it has to, doesn’t it? I mean—it was just a game, like you said.” I felt the iron grip on my heart tighten, the knife in my chest twist in deeper. “I always knew…Right from the start I knew this was something casual. I know that’s what we agreed. And I know that I hoped…But this was the way it was always gonna go. We just…We just keep telling ourselves it was just a game.”

“I don’t think it was ever a game to me.” And then, utterly unexpectedly and without any real prompt at all, she said something that was at once so beautiful and yet so terrible. “I’m in love with you, Alex.”