how hard it has been for you,” he said. “How long has it been?”
“A little over two years,” I said.
“Is that a long time or a short time?”
That’s when I knew that Sam was sincerely listening, that he was interested in learning exactly who I was in that moment. I realized that Sam understood me, maybe had always understood me, in a way that very few people did. And that meant that he knew that two years was both forever and just a moment ago.
“It depends on the day,” I said. “But right now, it feels like a long time. How about you? Who broke your heart?”
Sam sighed, as if preparing himself to rehash it all. “I was with someone for years,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out onto the water.
“What happened?” I asked.
“What always happens, I guess.”
“Werewolf got her?” I asked him.
He laughed and looked at me. “Yeah, brutal. Took her right out of my arms.”
I smiled and continued to listen.
“We just outgrew each other,” he said finally. “It sounds so banal. But it hurt like nothing before.”
I didn’t know anything about growing apart. I only knew being ripped apart. But I imagined it felt like a tree root slowly growing so big and strong that it breaks through the sidewalk. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It sounds awful.”
“I just wasn’t the same person at thirty that I was at twenty,” he said. “And neither was she.”
“I don’t think anybody is,” I said.
“I feel a bit jaded by it now, to be honest,” he said. “Like, will I be the same person at forty? Or . . .”
“Will we outgrow this, too?” I said, completing his thought.
And then Sam said something that has stayed with me ever since.
“I think it’s a good sign, though,” he said, “that I was crazy about you at sixteen and I’m still crazy about you now.”
I smiled at him. “It certainly seems promising,” I said.
Sam shortened the distance between us and put his arm around me. My shoulder crept into the pit of his arm and he reached across the length of my back. He squeezed me just the littlest bit.
It didn’t seem easy, the idea of loving someone again.
But it did seem possible.
So I sat there with him, watching the river, and allowing myself to feel hope again, to feel joy again, to feel how nice it was to be in a man’s arms on a bench by the river.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that.
I just know that it was four a.m. when I finally made it home.
At my front door, in the early hours of the morning, fifteen years after we met, Sam Kemper finally kissed me.
It was sweet and fresh and gentle. He smelled like morning dew, like a wonderful beginning.
“When can I see you again?” he asked as he looked at me.
I looked right back at him, no artifice between us. “I’m here,” I said. “Call me.”
Four and a half months into our relationship, I told Sam I loved him. He’d said it a few weeks before and told me that I didn’t need to say it back, not then anyway. He said he’d been head over heels for me all through high school, carrying a torch for me since the first time he met me at the store. He told me that part of the reason he left Acton without saying good-bye the summer before college was that he knew that I had fallen in love with Jesse, that he didn’t have a shot.
“What I’m saying is that loving you—even if I’m not sure you love me—it’s familiar territory,” he said. “I’ve picked it right back up like riding a bike. And I can do it for a little while longer, if that’s what you need.”
I was immensely grateful because it was exactly what I needed.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I did. I knew I loved him even before he said it. But I couldn’t utter the words. I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge the shift that had already happened. I wasn’t ready to let go of the word “wife” and grab on to the word “girlfriend.”
But that night, four and a half months in, as we both lay in my bed, naked and touching, entangled in blankets and sheets, I realized that even if I wasn’t ready for the truth, that didn’t make it untrue.
“I love you,” I said into the darkness, knowing the sound had nowhere to go but