Chris is his opposite. He has blond hair and emerald eyes and a jawline he doesn’t keep hidden behind stubble. Chris’s job requires him to be clean cut, so his smooth skin makes him appear years younger than he actually is. And he has this adorable dimple that appears in the center of his chin when he smiles. I love it when he smiles, even after all these years of marriage.
When I compare the two of them, it’s hard to believe Jonah and Chris are both thirty-five. Chris still has a baby face and could pass for being in his twenties. Jonah looks all of thirty-five and seems to have grown several inches, even since high school.
It makes me wonder how much different I look now than I did as a teenager. I’d like to think I still appear as youthful as Chris, but I certainly feel a lot older than thirty-three.
Well. Thirty-four, now.
Jonah brushes past me to grab a plate from the cabinet. He glances at me when he does and holds his stare. I can tell by the look on his face he has something to say, but he probably won’t say it because he’s always inside his head. He thinks more than he speaks.
“What?” I stare back at him—waiting for a response.
He shakes his head and turns around. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“You can’t look at me like that and not tell me what you were about to say.”
He sighs, his back still to me as he grabs the head of lettuce and sticks the knife into it. “It’s your birthday. I don’t want to bring it up on your birthday.”
“Too late for that.”
He faces me again with a hesitant look in his eye, but he concedes and tells me his thoughts. “You’ve barely spoken to me since I moved back.”
Wow. He cuts right to the chase. I can feel my chest and neck heat from the embarrassment of being called out. I clear my throat. “I’m speaking to you now.”
Jonah folds his lips together, like he’s trying to remain patient with me. “It’s different. Things feel different.” His words tumble around in the kitchen, and I want to dodge them, but the kitchen is too damn small.
“Different from what?”
He wipes his hands on a dish towel. “From how it used to be. Before I left. We used to talk all the time.”
I almost scoff at that ridiculous comment. Of course things are different. We’re adults now, with lives, and children, and responsibilities. We can’t just go back to the carefree friendships we all had back then. “It’s been over seventeen years. Did you think you could show back up and the four of us would fall right back into place?”
He shrugs. “Things fell back into place with me and Chris. And me and Jenny. Just not with me and you.”
I waver between wanting to duck out of the kitchen and yelling all the things I’ve been wanting to yell at him since he left in such a selfish way.
I take a sip of my wine to stall my response. He’s staring at me with eyes full of disappointment as I formulate a reply. Or maybe he’s staring at me with contempt. Whatever he’s feeling, it’s the same look he gave me seconds before he walked away all those years ago.
And just like back then, I don’t know if his disappointment is directed inward or outward.
He sighs. I can feel the weight of all his unpackaged thoughts.
“I’m sorry I left the way I did. But you can’t stay mad at me forever, Morgan.” His words come out quietly, like he doesn’t want anyone else to hear our conversation. Then he walks out of the kitchen and ends it.
It isn’t until this moment that I’m reminded of the heaviness I used to feel when he was around. Sharing the same air with him sometimes felt stifling back then, like he was selfishly taking more of it than he needed and I was hardly left with any air at all.
That same stifling feeling is back again, surrounding me in my own kitchen.
Even though he’s no longer in the kitchen and the door is swinging back and forth, I can still feel the heaviness bearing down on my chest.
As soon as I stop the swinging kitchen door with my foot, Jenny pushes it back open. The conversation I refused to partake in with Jonah gets shoved to the back of my mind for me to stew over