exact time, felt like more than lucky coincidence.
“Tell me what you meant,” I said. Jamie’s hand tensed on my neck and then lifted. I sat up again, faintly surprised the sun was still out.
Jamie cleared her throat and took a sip of watered-down coffee, all the while avoiding my eyes. She was silent for what felt like ten full minutes, and just as I was about to prod her, she looked at me and spoke.
“You were always going to leave me,” she said. “From the minute we got together, or maybe even before—and I just didn’t notice because I liked you so much—you were fixated on the future. And in your future, you moved across the country and became a national soccer star, and it was clear I wasn’t there.”
I felt a knot form in my chest and descend to my stomach. My face got hot and my ears rang. All the signs were there: I’d been called out, caught doing something wrong even if I hadn’t fully realized I was doing it. Though part of me had known. I had to have known. Because I knew instantly that Jamie wasn’t wrong to have felt that way. I’d looked so far ahead for so long that I’d forgotten she was there with me, then, in the present. Now past. First I was too early and now I was too late.
“It wasn’t like I planned to break up with you right before college,” I said. “It wasn’t, like, oh, I can’t wait to meet a different girl at school.”
“I know,” said Jamie.
“Do you?”
She shifted in her seat. “I think putting it that way trivializes my point. You’re making it out to sound like I was just this jealous, insecure girlfriend.”
The knot kicked around my stomach, called out once more.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that. But it’s not like it didn’t occur to me that you might meet someone else at school.”
“Like who?” Jamie looked at me incredulously, as if it were impossible there could ever be anyone else, and a warm, buzzing electricity shot through to my toes.
“We’re not always gonna be the only queer girls we know,” I said. “We already aren’t.”
Jamie flushed, and I knew we were both thinking of Ruby, and Natalie, too. All the things we did and didn’t want to know. “You think that’s why we got together? Just, we’re both gay? That’s a little homophobic.”
“Is it really homophobic, or is it more heteropatriarchal? Something-normative?”
“You’re being a brat,” she said.
I was quiet because I knew she was right, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.
“Okay,” she sighed. “I’m gonna move past that, because I know that’s not really what you think. I know you loved me.”
I noted the past tense, and a small but insistent part of me cried out, wanting to correct it, but I was petrified. You don’t tell the girl who dumped you that you still love her four months later. That’s not how you retain the little dignity you have left. It wasn’t fair of her to put me in the position to correct her, and it wouldn’t be fair to Ruby if I did. So instead I said nothing.
“All I meant,” Jamie started again, “was that we always had an expiration date, as girlfriends. And if you know that, why wait around for it?”
I looked down at my lap just in time to pretend Jamie couldn’t see the tears sliding down my face. As embarrassed as I was to be crying here in public, in front of her, I was also relieved. The thing I’d most wanted to avoid doing in front of Jamie post-breakup was happening. It couldn’t get any worse. And knowing that made me free. I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve and looked up.
“I was planning trips,” I said. “I was gonna meet you in New York so we could take a bus to DC and see all the government buildings and statues and stuff.” It was Jamie’s turn to look away, dropping her gaze to