I had no idea I’d been sitting on my couch in a daze for so long. And in eight hours, I had to be back at school, chipper and ready to help my students. I had to lock this away, and act like it didn’t bother me.
Had to pretend I still had a future here, when I wasn’t at all sure that was true.
I forced myself to move from the couch to my bedroom, not that I had much hope for sleep. I flopped down on my bed, and Gretchen, who’d been curled up at its foot, came and snuggled next to me.
Somehow, the fact that she still loved me made everything worse. I felt incompetent. Not in my teaching, but in my naive belief that everything would work out. It was worse than naive. It was just plain dumb.
I felt like I’d spent my whole life bracing against blows, and I always got hit from the one direction I wasn’t defending. I closed my eyes against the tears I felt building up behind them—and then jumped a foot off the bed when someone knocked on my window.
Gretchen meowed loudly in protest as I sat up, my heart pounding. The curtains blew in from the gentle breeze, carrying the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle, and someone was standing outside in the dark. What the—
“Julian? You okay?”
Connor.
I crossed to the window and bent down to see him standing outside in the bushes, peering in. Memories washed over me in successive waves, all the times Connor had knocked on my window in high school, just like now, waiting to be let in.
It had been an accident, really, the first time. I’d been sitting out on the roof of my parents’ house one night, wishing I were anywhere but there, when Connor had stumbled into our backyard.
I could tell he was looking for someplace to hide. You can’t spend half your life wishing you could escape and not recognize that desire in someone else.
And even though we weren’t friends—even though Connor was dark and intimidating and rumors swirled around him like smoke in the halls of our high school—I’d called out to him. Told him to climb up. Spent a confusing, confounding hour with a guy who intimidated the crap out of me, only for him to slip back out the window and into the night.
I had no idea, then, how many more times I’d watch him do the same thing in the months that followed.
I lived in a different house now. My bedroom was on the ground floor, and there was no need to be quiet in case my parents heard, and we were adults. There was no reason at all for Connor to be standing outside my window—and yet, he was.
“What are you—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. I was still in the grip of memory, trying to shake the voice in the back of my mind that whispered about all the times I’d kissed Connor through a window, just like this.
“I texted you,” Connor said. It was dark out, but enough lamp light spilled through the window to catch on his cheekbones. Did he look sheepish?
“You texted me?” I said, at a loss for how this explained Connor standing waist deep in my hydrangeas.
“Yeah.”
“Why would you—I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be rude. My brain’s just not really working tonight. Did you need something? Or were we supposed to meet?”
“No, I just—”
Connor stopped talking as quickly as he’d started, and when he spoke again, he seemed abashed, which was disconcerting. Connor wasn’t bashful. Connor was direct, and proud, and confident.
“I don’t know, we said we were going to be friends. So I figured I should text you or something. That’s what friends do, right?”
My mouth dropped open. That’s what friends do? It was, I supposed. I just hadn’t expected Connor to actually mean it.
“But you didn’t text back,” he continued. “I messaged you at like, 4:00, and when you didn’t respond by 8:00, I got worried. And when midnight rolled around and I still hadn’t heard from you—well, I tried your door, but you didn’t answer. And then I saw the light on in here, and I thought—” he shook his head. “This was stupid. I’ll go.”
“No. No, wait. It wasn’t stupid.”
I paused, still trying to make this new version of Connor fit with the one I’d spent the past month with—who was himself different from the Connor I’d known at age eighteen.
Maybe Connor didn’t want me the way