and finish it.
And we’d play our game again.
And finally, finally, I would tell him the truth.
Only when I got back from the bathroom, he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the dance floor, wasn’t at the bar. Finally I headed out to the tiny concrete courtyard in the back where people went to smoke sometimes. There was a group sitting around a picnic table, passing a vaporizer. I turned toward the corner, and that’s when I spotted them. Xavier and Ivy, up against the wall, their eyes were closed. They weren’t kissing or moving or anything, they were just like that, holding each other tight.
I felt hot and sick, full of rage and terror.
I backed up quickly, before they saw me. I went through the bar, outside into the hot night, and then I was gone.
My heart pounded powerfully, painfully. I didn’t know then what I know now: be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.
They say guys make stupid decisions with their dicks, but Xavier knew the very dumbest ones he’d ever made were the ones he made with his heart.
Ivy held his hand as she led him through the trees toward that place in the woods, midway between their houses, where they always used to go. She squeezed tight like she was trying to keep him from running away. He probably should have run – some part of him knew that – but his stupid heart kept marching him forward.
When he’d seen Ivy at Sloe Joe’s, he’d tried to remind himself that he was supposed to be mad, but all he’d felt was surprised, and maybe a little bit scared, and mostly just very, very happy to see her.
She brought him outside to the courtyard, and instead of saying anything, she’d just wrapped her arms around him and stayed like that. And then after a while asked him, please would he please come with her to their spot in the woods, and he said okay.
On the train, she’d leaned her head back against his chest and nestled into him like the whole last month of them being apart hadn’t even happened. When he caught sight of them together in the reflection in the glass, he saw that he was smiling.
Now they walked in between the trees where there was no path, but they both knew the way blackout drunk with their eyes closed. They’d come here together so many times, starting back when it was still winter but the smell of spring was creeping in over the melting snow. “It’s the time of year to fuck against a tree in the woods,” is what Ivy had told him when she’d brought him the first time. And then she’d taken off his gloves and put his hands up under her coat and sweater onto her warm skin.
Now, the air was hot and thick in that late-July way. And as he followed her, he tried not to think about the last time they’d spoken before this. He tried not to think about how he’d gone to a party in a neighboring town to hear his friend Ethan’s band play on a night Ivy had said she was busy with a family thing. But then he found her there, out back next to one of the kegs, wrapped up in a skinny punk-looking guy with a septum ring and a leather cuff on each wrist. And when she looked up and saw him seeing her, she didn’t even seem surprised. Almost like she’d expected to get caught, or wanted to. “Oh shit, is this the chump you’ve been texting me about?” the punk guy asked. And he laughed.
Xavier tried not to think about how he’d waited to hear from her after that, assumed she’d come to him full of apologies, like she usually did after she’d done something messed up, only this time she didn’t. And he tried not to think about how a week after that he’d gone back to their place in the woods, because it was late and he couldn’t sleep and maybe some part of him hoped she might be out there missing him like he’d been missing her. And the crazy thing is, she was there. But she wasn’t alone. Turned out, she didn’t think of it as her and Xavier’s spot the way he did. He left as quickly as he could. They never heard Xavier running in those woods. They were making too much noise on their own.
He was trying not to think about that then as Ivy pulled him forward, twigs cracking under their feet. The moon was so bright, everything was glowing. The farther away from the rest of the world they went, the easier it was to tell himself that all of this was happening outside of regular space and time and didn’t count. That he could have this one night, whatever this was, and not even have to pay for it later.
Now they had reached the place where they always used to go, but there was something new: a tire dangling from a tree branch, connected to a rope that did not look thick or strong enough to hold it. Ivy pressed a button on the swing and a string of lights glowed yellow.
Ivy leaped up onto the swing, stuck one leg out behind her. She had taken ballet for years as a kid and could still move like that, like the air that surrounded her was different than regular air, thicker and thinner both. And when she smiled at him, everything else was wiped away, and the only thing in his mind and his heart was how very much he had missed her.
She lowered herself down, slipped both legs into the middle of the tire. “Wind me up, please,” she said, like a kid asking him to play. Ivy was so many things all at once. And so he held her hand and walked circles around her until the rope was high and tight and it seemed like it might snap. And then he let her go and she spun and spun as the rope unwound. She leaned her head back, and she opened her mouth like she was screaming, but no sound came out. When the spinning stopped she got off the swing and pulled him to her, and that’s when he realized she was crying.
“I am such a shit,” she said. “I’m an absolute horrible, awful shithead.”
His heart was beating so hard. “Wait,” he said. All he wanted then was for her to stop crying. When Ivy cried, it felt like the only thing in the world that mattered. “Please . . .” But as he searched for the right words, she raised her hand to his lips to quiet him, shook her head, and looked down.
“I deserve for you to hate me.” She looked up at him, blinked her big wet eyes. “Do you?”
And he told her what he’d always told her when she cried over something she’d done – that everyone makes mistakes. And of course he didn’t hate her. He never could.
She stood on her tiptoes and leaned in close.
Xavier had heard that the moment before an accident time slows down. One second feels like a minute, an hour, a month. That’s what it was like then, out there in those woods, her lips inching toward his so slowly, his heart racing, stomach twisting, like he knew this kiss would either kill him or save him.
“This is a terrible idea,” he said quietly, right before their lips touched. “This is definitely going to end in disaster.”
“Not this time,” she said. “I promise this time. Nothing bad will happen.”
Later he would look back at that night and remember how they’d both believed so much in the truth of what they’d said.
It’s just that only one of them was right.
I stood at the station, waiting for the train, staring into the dark empty tracks, trying not to picture the things I could not stop picturing. Xavier and Ivy out in the courtyard, pressed together. Xavier and Ivy kissing. Xavier and Ivy, wherever they were now, her hand against his chest, reaching in, tearing out his heart, putting it into her mouth, and eating it.
Somehow I ended up with the rest of the whisky. I was sick and hollow and needed this to stop, so I sipped and sipped until it was gone. But it didn’t fix anything.
I closed my eyes and new images filled my head, ones that hurt as much as the others, maybe more: Xavier’s face so close to mine, his grin seeming to mean something I so desperately wanted it to.
It hadn’t always been painful with me and Xavier. There was a whole year before this when we