No Ainsley. No mysterious Elena. Phew.
The music (Black Flag) was loud, and the alcohol was overflowing, but there were no corny signs of a teary goodbye party.
“Tom and Jadie are on their way.” Alex handed me a beer. “Wanna smoke outside?”
“You smoke now?” I felt my eyes widening.
Seeing him was weird. Not bad weird. Not good weird, either. Just…weird.
Alex smiled, tapping an unlit cigarette over his palm. “Here and there.”
“Bad habit in general, but especially for a dentist,” I commented.
He grabbed my hand and squeezed. “Let’s just get out of here for a sec.”
A few minutes later, we were on a bench in his backyard. He lit his cigarette while I checked my messages on my phone. I was kind of eager to check my MySpace account when I got back. I had been talking to a few like-minded people and having a lot of fun talking to one, specifically. A Northern Irish guy living in England who had really good taste in music. And this time I meant it. I was done pretending. This guy and I….we were on the same wavelength about pretty much everything.
“So how’ve you been?” Alex asked.
I put my phone down, turning to him. “Good. Are you excited for Sweden?”
He shrugged. “Not really. My stupid cousin moved in with his girlfriend, so I had to find last-minute accommodations. I’m now going to be living with four randos I don’t even fucking know. Oh, and learning Swedish is going to be a bitch. Probably should’ve thought about that when I planned to move there FUCKING SIX YEARS AGO. But oh, well.”
I cackled. He was good ol’ Alex again, and I finally let myself unwind.
“You always land on your feet, Al.”
Alex jerked his chin toward me. “What about you? What are your college plans?”
I looked at my phone, which was sitting between us on the bench, and thought about Patrick, the guy I was talking to from England.
“I think I want to try to get accepted to a university in London,” I heard myself say out loud. It was only when I said it that I realized I meant it with my entire heart. I wanted to move there. I’d been to London plenty of times before and loved it dearly.
Alex whistled low. “Expensive plan. Mommy and Daddy know ’bout it?”
“They’re about to.” I laughed.
“And what about Brent?” Alex asked brashly, the sharp edge in his voice telling me he had planned to ask me this question before I set foot in his house. “Still in the picture?”
“We’re just friends,” I cemented.
I refrained from asking if he was seeing someone. I couldn’t handle the pain. Maybe I was a coward, but I just couldn’t.
But, of course, Alex went ahead and updated me, anyway.
“I haven’t been seeing anyone. I don’t know if Jadie mentioned that, but anyway.” He took a drag of his cigarette, shrugging.
“Oh.” I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding until right that moment. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“I was a little—okay, a whole fucking lot—shell-shocked when we broke up,” Alex admitted. “Everything just became very real, very suddenly, and I didn’t want to not-follow up on my Sweden plans, so I needed a clean cut. But then I had time to digest everything, and, well, it kind of freaking sucks. We’ve lost four months together.”
“We did.” I took his hand, stroking it gently. It felt good to hear that, even if I knew we were not getting back together under any circumstances. Maybe we didn’t come full circle, but our bruised souls did, and that was enough. To know how deeply we cared for one another after all.
“I’m not going to get over you anytime soon, Honeypie. In Sweden, or anywhere else in the world.” He smiled a sad smile that broke my heart to pieces.
“Yeah, me either.”
He leaned down and kissed me. I ran my hand through the buzz cut on his head. It felt like kissing someone completely different. Someone who smelled of cigarettes and didn’t have long-ish hair and wasn’t my loving, devoted boyfriend anymore.
It gave me a thrill.
When we pulled away, he brushed his thumb over my cheek.
“Maybe in another life, Honeypie?”
“Definitely, Al.”
Alex flew to Sweden, and, true to his promise from two and half years ago, he didn’t cave, and didn’t open a MySpace account. Which, in my opinion, was a crying shame, because MySpace was the shit.
I talked to Patrick almost every night, about anything from music to books and pop culture, and we had a lot of fun.
That following June, I graduated from high school, and got a phone call from Alex, telling me Stockholm was really beautiful and really expensive and that Swedish wasn’t totally impossible to learn. He congratulated me. I told him I missed him. He didn’t say it back.
The week after, I booked a ticket for a week in London. A childhood friend who’d moved to Scotland a few years earlier with her family was coming down from Glasgow to meet me. I was going to celebrate my eighteenth birthday in style, getting drunk and having fun. I still didn’t commit to a college, but I promised my parents that I would as soon as I came back from the English capital.