Alcohol has a way of revealing the truth, which is why I was drinking a bottle of Perrier at Geddy’s. I saw at least two dozen people I had not seen in over two decades, all of them revealing more truth than I was willing to say.
I reminisced with David and Joshua about the time we stole a political sign of a man running for county commissioner, painted it over and changed it to him running for President of the United States. It was his fault for running for county commissioner during a presidential election year.
We were sixteen at the time. How could you blame us? The politician had placed the sign in a field belonging to David’s father without permission. We had listened to his father gripe about it. So we had taken care of it.
But I admitted to nothing.
Annie found me there, which made me happy. She and Kathy were dancing in the way girls do not matter what age.
It brought back memories. I’d always found the way Annie moved—well—moving.
After a few songs, she made her way to my table, little droplets of sweat on her forehead. Her eyes flashing. She sat down beside me and looked at my drink.
“Perrier?” she questioned me.
“Yep.”
“Me too,” she said, holding up her green bottle. “You don’t drink?”
“Oh, I do, but just didn’t feel like it tonight. You?”
“I quit. Many years ago. I had a pretty big problem in high school and college and even after. I kinda lost myself.”
I watched her, still moving to the music while sitting in her chair. It reminded me of prom—a harsh memory.
“You okay,” she asked, somehow sensing discomfort.
“Too loud,” I said. “It’s bothering my ears. Wanna get out of here?”
“Yes!” she said.
Outside, we could hear the thumping music from inside and it was almost the right volume. Annie still moved because that’s who she was. She smiled up at me as I moved a little, and she took it as permission to just dance. So she did. I moved with her, but mostly just watched her.
When one song ended and another began, she finished a spin, nearly breathless, her face flushed and tilted up toward mine.
“Wanna walk?” she asked.
“How about a drive?” I offered. “We’re both safe to drive.”
She followed me across the gravel parking lot, and I heard her stop a few steps behind me.
“What the heck kind of car is this?”
“Aston Martin V8 Vantage,” I said.
“Holy shit, Ethan.” She stood there looking at it, then at me, then back at the car, as if she were trying to reconcile the two. I knew the feeling. Some days I couldn’t reconcile them either.
She climbed in gingerly, as if the leather might bruise, and looked up at me as I closed the door for her.
When I got into the car, I was happy to see that she had removed her shoes. That was just so Annie.
“Where are we going?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Where would you like to go?”
“Don’t care,” she said. She fumbled around and found the window switch, letting the evening air glorify itself in her hair.
It took no more than five minutes to get there.
“We’re going to your old house? Where you grew up.”
“Yep.”
“There’s a daycare there or something now in the side apartment.”
“Used to be,” I said. “Now it’s going to be my office.
“Yours?”
“I bought the house yesterday after I signed the contract.”
I pulled into the driveway, parking under the big old ash tree my father and I planted in 1980.
I got out of the car and looked back at her. “Come,” I said.
“Let me get my shoes on.”
“Where we’re going you won’t need shoes.”
“Where?”
“You know where.”
She hesitated, waiting by the car. But I didn’t wait.
I crossed the lawn and went to the hill in the back of the house.
I heard her bare feet running behind me moments later.
I found her hand just as readily as I had thirty years before, in the same spot, and we lay under the moonlit sky watching the clouds move above us.
The night blanketed us in unusual warmth as if it had been expecting this all along.
“The last time we were here,” she said, “We had—”
I passed her a clover flower, plucked from nearby.
“You remember,” she said. She wasn’t awed by it. She had expected it.
We lay there for a long time, our hands entwined. There was no caressing of the thumb, or playing with the fingertips, or any of that. It was just comfort. Like it belonged that way.
“I need to tell you,” she said at last. “What happened.”
“You don’t need to tell me anything,” I whispered.
“No, I do,” she said. “About what happened to us. When you asked me to junior prom, I almost said no.”
“I know,” I replied. “We hadn’t talked much since sixth grade really.”
“But when you showed up at my parent’s house that Sunday and asked me, I want you to know that my heart leapt out of my chest.”
“It did?”
“You must remember me crying.”
“I found it confusing.”
“I was just so happy that you came to me.”
She turned her body sideways toward me. I turned my head to look at her.
“I saw you kissing Mark,” I said. It was less an accusation and more of an observation—at least in my mind.
“Wait, what?”
“At the prom.”
“That’s why you just left me there?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the school year?”
“Why did you do it?” I asked. “I mean, you didn’t owe me anything, I guess. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. But you don’t do that when you are on a date with someone else.”
“I wish I had had this conversation with you all those years ago. I didn’t kiss him. He kissed me.”
“But you didn’t stop it.”
“Well—,” she began, frustration evident in her voice. “I’m asking you to try to understand, Ethan. I was messed up for a very long time because of what was stolen from me. I felt disgusting, unlovable. And when it happened I froze. I didn’t know how to react. It was like it was happening again.”
“So you didn’t want to kiss him?”
“Heck no! I wanted you to kiss me. But you just left.”
“Why would I stay?”
“So you could have seen me sock him in the gut afterwards!”
“You punched him? I thought you were just throwing me away.”
“God, no, Ethan. I never would have done that. It’s just that you were gone by the time I came to my senses. And then you didn’t talk to me for three months. You didn’t answer the phone. You didn’t open the door when I came to your house.”
“What did you expect?”
“Well it makes sense now. But I thought you knew. You went to the beach party with me, after all.”
“Hold on a second,” I said. “I didn’t go to the beach party with you. I went because Randy mentioned there was a party. I didn’t even know you were going to be there.”
“But I explained it all in the note, and asked you to come.”
“Note?”
“The one I gave your sister. I mean that’s why you came, right?”
“Actually,” I said. “I told her to throw it away.”
“Shit,” Annie said, growing silent.
We lay there for a few minutes, watching the moon.
“So,” she said, her voice a little shaky, “You didn’t read the explanation, and you have thought all this time that I just kissed some other guy? All these years you’ve thought that?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So then why did you sneak into the lifeguard shack with me at the beach?”
“Because you were happy to be with me. You were happy to be kissing me until—wait a second—”
“Ethan—” she said.
“That’s why you pushed me away! Finally, we were kissing. Like real adult kissing, in the lifeguard shack. The best moment of my life. And then when you pushed me away. You started crying, and you ran.”
“When you touched me—there,” she said.
I didn’t say anything for a long time. I remembered the exact moment. My hand moving from her waist, and the way her whole body had gone rigid beneath my fingers. I had expected nervousness. I had been nervous too. But what I saw in her eyes wasn’t the ordinary fear of a first time. It was something primal, something that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with me at the same time. She hadn’t just pulled away. She had fled.
And because I didn’t know — because I didn’t know what had been taken from her — I spent twenty years believing that what she was running from was me.
“I got scared,” she said.
“You ran away because someone else had hurt you,” I said. It wasn’t a question. It was the sound of twenty years rearranging themselves.
“Yeah,” she said.
“All this time I thought you didn’t want me. All this time, I thought it was because I was poor.”
She made a soft sound—almost a whimper and then spoke softly. “The worst thing was, I did want you. I really and truly did. I wanted to make love to you. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time. It’s just my head was so broken. I ruined what should have been the best night of our lives. I know that’s why you left town. Why you went as far away as you could. It was because of me.”
I didn’t answer her. I’m not sure I needed to.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
The silence enveloped us as a cloud passed over the moon, leaving us in the dark as the breeze momentarily chilled.
At last, I said, “Me too, Annie.”
We lay there for a half hour, not talking. We just held hands.
Finally, I stood and offered my hand. “Let’s get you home,” I said.
We rode in silence back to her house, a lovely little cape overlooking the river.
I walked her to her front door.
She stopped and turned to me.
“Would you like to come in?”
I looked out at the river watching the water crash at the foot of the falls.
“I’d like nothing better than to come in with you, but I think it’s probably better if I don’t.”
She looked at me, her eyes almost pleading, but then her face softened and she smiled.
“Would you kiss me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I will do that.”
It had been a long, long time since I had kissed a woman in that way. My wife had been a passionate kisser. She loved kissing me. I loved kissing her.
But kissing Annie was different in a way that I cannot adequately describe. Trying to explain it would be an injustice. So I won’t try. I’ll just say that It was everything to me.
When we broke apart, we were both breathless.
And I knew she wanted me to come in. And I really wanted to.
But I turned on my heel and left.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.