They met outside the hotel, in the pouring rain, and embraced. Awkward laughter tumbled from their lips as they greeted each other, and he tried not to notice the way her wet dress clung to her body, and she pretended not to see his eyes roving over her anyway.
“Should we go inside?” she asked above the dull roar of the rain. He nodded and rushed to open the door for her. She smiled a smile that stopped him in his tracks, and led the way inside, through the lobby and to the bar. They sat side by side on hard stools and their elbows almost touched, and both knew it, and neither dared move. The bartender set their drinks down in front of them—a vodka tonic for him, and a Moscow Mule for her—and they drank deeply in the silence.
The second round arrived before they found the courage to speak.
“So how’ve you been?”
He finally scattered the quiet that enveloped them. She laughed again, even though the question wasn’t funny, and reached a hand to her wet hair, as if she could fix it.
“I’ve, um, I’ve been really good. Travelling a lot, you know.”
“Right, right! The book tour. Congratulations, by the way. That’s—that’s great. I always knew you were going to make it big.”
She flushed and smiled, looked down at her lap to hide her pleasure. “Thank you,” she said to her hands. She looked back up and beamed, and he couldn’t catch his breath. “And what about you? Do you still live around here or are you just here for the reunion…?”
He flashed an awkward smile and took another quick drink. “Just here for the reunion,” he said, while the liquor burned through his chest. He didn’t look at her, but at his drink, and so he missed the way her eyes glowed as she gazed at him… like she was staring at a great and beautiful thing, and not a middle-aged man she’d known as a boy.
She had been falling in love with him since they were thirteen-years-old. She didn’t even know it was love, not for years. Not until she’d gotten her heart broken by other men, until she invited them into her bed and let them leave and survived the pain.
She only knew it was love because it hurt to think of him. Her heart twisted whenever she realized how much she missed him… like she was missing a heartbeat. She physically ached when they spoke.
Every inch of her body felt the absence of him. The weight of her love crushed her.
She never told him. She couldn’t.
But she was drowning.
Anna Clark took another deep drink while the man beside her told her about moving away from their hometown after his divorce.
“I needed a new start,” he said. “This place was haunted.” His eyes finally dared to find her, and all over again he was speechless.
I saw you everywhere, he wanted to say. My wife left me because my heart never belonged completely to her. I left because I was trying to leave you.
It didn’t work.
The weight of his love could have reversed where the sun rose and set. How could so much pain be the result of a love that could stretch across the entire galaxy? Fill every ocean? End every war?
He loved her that much. He could make blind men see, like loving her was the greatest miracle and everything else was child’s play.
The words smoldered on his tongue while he looked at her, and the when she finally summoned enough bravery to look at him again, Benjamin Locke tore his eyes away and swallowed the ashes.
“I’m so sorry, Ben,” she murmured, and her hand reached out to cover his. Fire spread over his skin and he inhaled sharply. Anna swallowed thickly, and unbidden, words leapt from her throat to freedom. “Do you want to come upstairs with me?”
Ben startled away from her touch, and hurt flashed in her eyes, but he recovered and said, rushed and breathy, “Yes.”
They took their drinks, checked in at the front desk, and found their way upstairs. Their hands brushed as they stood in the elevator, and both thought they would melt into the floor.
In the hallway, Ben, urged on by liquid courage, took her hand and led her to their room. Her eyes locked with his just outside.
Their mouths met in a rush. Still fumbling with the room key, their tongues explored each other’s mouths, tasting—devouring—each other’s want. Her fingers threaded through his belt loops and his hands snaked under her shirt and skimmed the small of her ack as he wrapped his arm around her waist to anchor her to him. His other hand finally got the key in the door and he fell backwards against it as they kissed, and they stumbled into the room, their legs tangling together. Anna’s heels nearly impaled his foot, and he didn’t care. He dropped the room key on the table in the foyer and they made their way to the bed, shedding clothes as they went.
His mouth mapped out every place on her body where her heartbeat hid. Her fingers trailed over every inch of his body, a body she had once known well, had hugged, watched, and daydreamed about nearly daily. Passion poured out of them, and their limbs tangled together until it was unclear which body parts belonged to whom. When they finally untangled, he stood to retrieve water from the mini-fridge, and he groaned as he stretched. Anna sprawled on the bed behind him, and he smiled when he saw her tiny frame taking up the whole thing.
He set a water down beside her, donned a robe, and sat in the chair across from the bed, and looked at the picture on the wall above the table… flowers, with petals shaped like hearts.
“Do you ever think about how we shouldn’t have met?”
He turned around, cocked his head, and studied her, lying on her back, one hand toying with her necklace, and staring at the ceiling. Something inside him began to fracture—fissures crept up his heart, spread through his veins. She was so beautiful.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean our meeting was a coincidence. An accident. I switched classes on a whim. You picked up the same class that morning. We never would have crossed paths if it weren’t for that one little class.” She turned her head and looked at him, and her eyes welled with tears. “I wouldn’t even know what your voice sounds like. I wouldn’t even know your name.”
He stared at her for a long, seemingly interminable moment. His blue eyes were depthless; she was drowning in them all over again when he took a heavy breath. “I knew your name. My sister came home years before we met, talking about this brilliant, brave, beautiful girl in her English class. My mom asked who she was talking about and Claire said, ‘Anna Clark.’”
Anna closed her eyes and tears streaked across the bridge of her nose and down her cheek into her hair. Her words strangled themselves when she spoke.
“You really remember that?”
“Anna,” he said softly, and the two syllables were a prayer on his tongue. “I remember everything about you. If it had to do with you, or you were there, or you cared about something… I remember.”
She didn’t speak. Her hand moved from her necklace to her mouth and her body shook as she cried.
“Anna,” he repeated. She squeezed her eyes tighter. “I love you. I have been in love with you—” His voice cracked and she cried harder, sobs wracking her body even while she tried in vain to stifle them behind her hands. “I have loved you forever,” he choked, and he crossed the room to hold her as they wept.
It was hours before they laughed again. For hours they laid together, her head on his chest, drinking in his heartbeat, and he stroked her hair, running his fingers though the wild auburn locks and imaging repeating the action every night for the rest of his life.
They spoke about their past, reliving every moment they had together. Their stories chased each other around the room; his recollection of their first awkward dance together, when her tentative arms around his neck were a tourniquet for every wound that ever split him open, and her smile was the sunlight he thought he’d never seen before. Her memory of the first time she ever saw him; tall, handsome, unafraid of anything. She got every detail right. The white button down and dark jeans, blonde curls mussed to perfection. She remembered everything… Right down to the shoes he wore—dark brown Oxfords. “Like you were already an attorney,” she teased.
They recalled everything they could. Ushered every past moment into the present, as if they could make up for lost time.
In a way, they did. In one night—twenty years and three days from the last time they saw each other— they fell in love all over again.
They’d begun as strangers. They’d begun as two kids, drawn inexplicably together. They had become friends, best friends, and then, ultimately, nothing. For years their friendship survived with sporadic texts, because they didn’t see each other after graduation. He went to college, settled down with a woman he met at university, had kids and a career. She fled the state and never looked back. She wrote a memoir, and tale after tale of almost-loves, and earned status and freedom. They didn’t see other, not until tonight, the night of their twenty-year high school reunion.
Neither of them acknowledged their futures without each other. It hurt too much to realize that for all their love, their lives didn’t fit. He was bound to his kids, his home in New York. She was contractually obligated to the road, and wouldn’t trade her wings for roots, even for Ben.
Yes, they loved each other. It wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.
They fell asleep locked in each other’s arms.
But in the morning, as the sun was rising—in the East, as it always did—Ben woke, and he stared at Anna, splayed on the sheets next to him, and he couldn’t bring himself to wake her to say goodbye.
His love had not, after all, been enough to stop time. And the pain would win again.
So he dressed silently, slowly. He moved around the room that had captured their one night together and he tried to drink in the memories of the evening, tried to freeze them in his mind like photographs, so he would never, ever lose the time he had with her.
When he was dressed, Ben leaned in to kiss her forehead. She started to stir, and then settled back into her sleep with a small smile on her lips. Everything in him broke.
Anna woke up two hours after he was gone. All that was left as proof of their evening together was the smell of him hanging in the air, and a note with one line written on it.
I will always love you.