The Gray Case

thirty-three

"I'm sorry," he blurts out. Marcus's apology comes in like a non-expected ending revelation. At some point, she had lost hope on their friendship, when just some time earlier she had sworn she would not have seen him slip away.

"For what?" She obviously can imagine what he's sorry about, but she wants to hear it all from him, every single bit of the story.

"For distancing myself, for ignoring you. I'm sorry for becoming such a negative person and putting you in between my problems with Alexander. It has never been your fault—it has never been his, either."

He heaves a deep sigh from within his chest, and from there a weight seems to be lifted.

"You know, I talked to Sofia yesterday and somehow, I finally opened my eyes. I realized I did everything wrong, and it was just time to let go." His words sound like closure, and Maya is there to listen to the troubles that are now hollow flashbacks of who he is.

He closes his eyes for seconds that seem to be flowing beyond time and space, as if he were going back to where his memories begin.

"I met Sofia in the summer before high school. We used to have a friend in common, so we used to hang out here and there and right from the first time I saw her, I adored her. There really wasn't anything I didn't like about her. Her hair, her eyes, her laugh: she was all perfect in my eyes. I remember I used to shower her with compliments every single time we saw each other because I figured she often forgot of how pretty she was," he says, smiling.

He is now looking up at the sky, concentrating on something even more high up than the sky itself.

"That summer, I gave her my third kiss in history but I always counted it as my first as I was head over heels for this girl. I was young but I just knew it. We started seeing each other more and more, to the point it was almost every day. She told me she liked me, and I told her I liked her too... and that was enough. We never got together and never broke up but it felt like we ended up doing both."

He pauses and she listens to his silence too, knowing that a lot of times, absence of words is just as important as their presence.

"She and I had a bond I had with no one else. Up to this day, I believe I'm one of the very few people that truly know her. You can't even imagine how many times I've seen her cry, how many stories she has told me about herself, about her family, about her broken relationship with her brother. She has told me her deepest secrets and I have never in my life cherished something more than I cherished what I had with her."

Maya is new to all of this and just can't understand where it all went wrong. "Then what happened?" She asks.

"High school happened. When school started, I joined the football team and she became a cheerleader. At the beginning of the year she told me she loved me, and I was on top of the world, yet in a short matter of time she began distancing herself. Although I noticed, I still decided I wanted to ask her out for real... that was when told me she didn't want to be with me but wanted to be with Alexander. And shortly after, they started dating," he says.

"I was devastated. I remember being so angry I didn't want to talk to anybody. I quit football and started hating Alexander and everyone around him so fucking much. I thought he knew, you know? We weren't close but I asked myself how could he not see the way I looked at her and talked about her? Then junior year came around and on her birthday, they had been broken off for about 5 months and for some reason, I bought her a gift and wanted to give it to her, even though we weren't talking. So, I went to her place by surprise and we ended up laying on her bed talking up until she let me kiss her and then told me to leave."

He sighs and turns to look at Maya in the eyes. "She was gorgeous in every way to me, while I was stupid, blind and in love. So in love the memory of her still haunted me and I still think about her, sometimes. So in love I couldn't blame her for not loving me, so I directed all my anger towards Alexander who had no fault, really. He was just oblivious and loved her just like I did, because he had every right to. I was so wrong for blaming him for a choice she had made on her own. I think I just wanted to be loved by her the way she loved Alexander, but I guess she forgot or simply didn't care that she once told me she loved me."