College Ruled

thirty-eight

38
___________

OUR APARTMENT is done.

       Like any logical person, I take this as a sign from the universe that whatever I had with Grayson was supposed to end. That the ache in my chest whenever I think of him belongs there. That it's okay—that it will go away.

       Even so, I spend a week camped out in my freshly painted room. Leyla checks on me as if I'm on hospice and this, at least, is easy. I blame my dead-like state on the headaches, on the concussion that I barely feel. I eat when she shoves food in my face, speak when she sits at the foot of my bed and watches me with too-wide, too-caring eyes.

       I am hopeless, I sometimes want to say. I have lost something that was never mine.

        I don't, of course. It would be much too dramatic a statement to shove onto Leyla. I tell her instead about the accident. About Christina and my's fight. About Brian and the deer and the woods where I couldn't find its corpse.

       "It probably ran off. Alive," she'd say. "You probably just clipped it."

       She didn't see the truck. Still, her assurance makes me feel better. Until I remember that something did die that night.

       (Again, I don't say that. Dramatics and all.)

        By the following Monday, the pain of the concussion is gone. Christina and I have begun to meet each other's eyes when we pass each other in the living room. The cuts on my face, the blow that had spread across my nose like a black eye, have faded to minor bruising. There, but ignorable.

        I decide it's enough to pretend the night never happened. That all of it never happened. There was no deer. No cabin. No Grayson.

It works for about a day.

      Then Wes finds me.

       He approaches me at the counter of The Java Joint as if I'm a bomb he's afraid will go off the second he gets too close. It's disturbing—the look of resigned fear that flashes across his face when our eyes meet.

He doesn't want to be here. Talking to me. Seeing me.

Fine.

"What do you want?" I bark.

Wes flinches. "I—," he starts. Shakes his head. "I don't know. I—"

"To drink." I point at the menu. "I'm assuming you're here for coffee."

"Right." He scratches the back of his neck and, without looking at the menu, says, "Brown Sugar espresso."

"Great—"

"Iced," he rushes as I pull a cup up from under the counter. He grins at me. Forced. Again, scared. "I want it iced. Sorry."

I throw the drink together under his watchful eye, a little clumsily. But if I make a mistake, Wes doesn't seem to notice. Or care. When I turn back with a finished drink, shoving the lid on a bit too harshly, light coffee spilling out onto my fingers, he isn't looking at my hands. Or the drink I place on the counter before him.