“Why did you shut me out?” I asked, my voice quiet.

He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, clearly struggling. The world suspended itself around us. Cars rushed by us, yet their headlights seemed to hold us still as a held breath. My whole life was in this timeless minute, because I was about to hear the explanation for the unexplainable four and a half years later.

“I’ve thought about that a lot, Amy. I don’t have an easy answer,” he said.

I wanted to interrupt him but I kept my mouth shut. He needed to tell me this, and it needed to be one-hundred percent on him. I had tortured myself over the years, trying to guess how I was somehow responsible for what Sam had done. No matter how hard my insecure, unworthy self tried to turn this around into a blame that I could place on me, though, I couldn’t. It was all him.

“When you won,” he said, slowly, “you won.” He tipped my head up to look me in the eye—he was a head taller. “You won decisively.” He shook his head. “I never had any question, and you were fine up there, on your game.”

“So were you,” I interrupted, breaking my own vow.

“But you were better,” he said, simply. “I had a lot riding on that debate.”

“We all did,” I said.

A pained expression covered his face. “There’s so much more to this than I think I can explain right now, but please let me say what I can say,” he stressed.

I nodded. Our legs began to walk in concert, left and left, right and right. “OK,” that was all I could think to say.

“My dad,” he said, the words coming out bitterly, “told me that at all costs, I needed to make it into the top three. And if I didn’t, I was a worthless piece of shit.”

I felt slapped, imagining the pain of his father saying that and taking it on myself. It hurt me to think that someone would hurt him like that. “Oh, Sam,” I whispered.

“Let me finish,” he said, holding out one hand, palm to me, his voice shaky, “because if I don’t finish, I don’t think I can do this.”

“This?”

“Oh, I can do this,” he stressed, stroking my hip and my ribcage with one hand, making me hot and needy, and wanting so much more. “But Amy,” he said, plaintively, stopping and turning toward me, his hands on my shoulders, his eyes serious. “What I need to do first is this; I need to tell you what happened, or at least part of it.” He sighed, his words taking on a gravitas that made time move slower. “My dad told me I had to win, and I had to win in order to get the debate scholarship to one of my top three. If I didn’t, it was Bible school. And that was it. So, you won and I left, knowing what I was about to go home to.”

“And what did you go home to?”

His face hardened and he closed off.

I could hear thousands of words in his silence, all of them thorned and barbed. I didn’t want to put him through reliving that, so I didn’t press. Not yet. Someday, when he was comfortable, he would tell me, and I would hold him, and I would help him, and we would be OK. Now was too soon. It was too much.

I reached up and kissed him gently on the lips, standing on tiptoe. “You don’t have to do this all right now, Sam.”

“I know.” His words hung in the air.

We continued walking, both eager to see what came next. “But I want you to understand that I was...stupid. There’s really no other word for it. I got home, uh...the world ended with my dad—that’s the easiest way to put it—and I just froze. Everything changed, I had to scramble to survive, and I became someone else because I had to.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He ran a hand through his hair, his jaw clenched, his body tight and restrained. “Amy...I just...” he stumbled. “Can we leave it at that? Can we just say that it’s like I disappeared and a different Sam—let’s call him Robot Sam—kicked in and everything was about functioning, and nothing was about emotion. It was easier to shut everything out, because I learned a hard lesson that day at home.”

“What lesson?” I whispered.

“There’s no such thing as unconditional love.”

I closed my eyes. The thorned and barbed words were as I had expected. What I wanted to say, what pushed against my lips so hard to come out, and yet, remained behind my teeth was—

Let me help you unlearn that lesson.

Sam

I was dying, absolutely dying. You would think that having a bunch of emotions inside me, it would be easy to just pick one and explore it. It’s the hardest fucking thing to do in the world. It’s so much easier to shut down, to close off, to protect myself and never look at them at all. I’d done more than ignore my emotional past. I’d put it in a box inside me, and I’d padlocked the box and thrown it and its key in separate oceans. And now, here with Amy, she was asking me to find the key, and the box, and unlock everything

We walked in silence for a long time, the peaceful presence of her enough. Words weren’t needed. Most people fill the space between them and other humans with speech. It clouds everything if words are used like that. Conversations that have meaning, or that teach—that’s different. But chatter for the sake of chatter is like crappy junk food.

It just makes you feel full, and then sick, and then you regret you ever partook.

Amy stopped at a brick building, weirdly angled into not-quite an L shape. She punched a code into the security door and took my hand, fingers entwining as we went in. We walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and were in an apartment the size of a healthy walk-in closet.

“Is this your apartment?” I said. “This is the whole thing?”

“Pretty much. There’s a bathroom right there.” She opened the door two or three feet, and then pushed something—I realized it was a futon—aside in order to open the door the whole way.

“This is your entire apartment?” I said, incredulous.

She frowned “Yeah, it’s mine. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing is wrong with it. It’s...” I looked around. “It’s quirky. I like it.”

Her shoulders lowered and she sighed. “Thanks.”

“This must be dirt cheap,” I said.

She grinned. “Yes, it is. And no roommates.”

A brief image of Joe coming out into the kitchen to grab sex food for Trevor and Darla floated through my mind. “What a luxury.”

“I don’t want to talk about my housing situation, Sam.”

She sat down on the futon, her body so graceful I enjoyed just watching how she moved, the curve of her hip, the stretch of her calf, how her wrist pivoted as she stretched, then folded herself into comfort. Mimicking her, I folded my legs and sat directly across, nervous yet fully present.

She took my hands. “I want to talk about us.”

“Is there an ‘us’?” I asked.

“That’s up to us.”

“Well then, what does us think?”

She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. “Us thinks that us needs to work this out.”

“Well, us is really, really, really sorry for being such an asshole four and a half years ago.”

“Us is pleased that us realizes that he’s an asshole.”

“Oh, us is now he?” We both laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

The sound of my dad’s scream echoed through my ears, how he had bellowed what a worthless piece of shit I was, and how he had ordered me to go to Bible college, and how, when he punched me with the full force of his rage, for the first time in my life, I had hit back. All of it poured into my mind, into my soul, as I looked Amy in the eye and I had to compartmentalize, and shut that shit down, and push it away, and still look at her and be a human being.

The familiar thrashings of anxiety, or panic—or whatever the fuck you called this intruder inside my body that took over when I least expected it—made me feel like I was nine different people in my own head, all at once. I couldn’t tell her the truth about what Dad had done when I had gone home from that debate, because I couldn’t share how damaged I really was. Not that I thought that alone would drive her away, but I thought her knowing might drive me away, and I didn’t want to be that guy again.

I felt like I had been drowning for years, and that Amy had reached out and pulled me to shore, given me CPR and got me breathing again. Each ragged breath I took right now, as I stared into her eyes and tried to figure out what to say next, was one more breath I didn’t have to take alone. The words all just felt like stabs, so I turned the words off, reached over, stretching myself fully, and kissed her. The skin of her jaw was soft and hard at once, and her lips melted into mine.

“Amy,” I whispered, the need growing so swiftly inside me, as if saying her name could make all of this more real.

Amy

Real. This was real. Sam was kissing me again, and we were in my apartment, and we weren’t high school students any more. No artificial barriers. No classrooms, no coaches, no parents. An ache deep inside came to the surface, breaking like a cresting wave, and I leaned into the kiss, my hands hungry for more of him, palms reaching under his t-shirt, hands meeting hot, firm flesh with rippled muscles and the movement of his body against mine as his hands echoed my own need.

Four years.

For years I’d waited and wondered what might have been. Would we have been together through college? Would we have gone to the same school, or just spent our weeks apart, together on weekends? Getting married now, after graduation? Some of my friends were engaged right now, a few of them actively planning weddings.

Whatever wondering I had faded fast as the hot push of Sam’s loving hands against my breasts made me moan his name. A penetrating overwhelm made my body go hard and soft at once. For all I’d built up this moment in my head, reality wasn’t letting me down.

I wasn’t letting go, either. As our mouths and hands explored each other, Sam’s apologized, too. I could feel it in how tender he was, how he alternated between passion and restraint. Could a kiss say “I’m sorry”?

Could the next one say, “Let’s try again”?

And the third ask, “May I make it up to you”?

I wasn’t the same Amy who cried for months and checked my phone compulsively two hundred times a day, waiting for a text that never came. That girl was long gone, replaced by the woman who pressed her belly against Sam’s, whose arms and hands and lips gave as much as he took, and who wasn’t going to allow everything to be this easy, if that’s what I wanted more than anything in the world.

Because easy wasn’t cutting it.

Easy was the easy way out.

Breaking the kiss, we panted for a few breaths, eyes meeting. In his I saw so many emotions—desire, regret, excitement—and I imagined I mirrored those right back.

“Why, Sam? Why now?”

Our knees pressed into the futon, both of us half upright, arms wrapped around but pulled back. My breasts rose and fell with each fevered inhale and exhale, while Sam’s abs worked hard against his shirt, his breathing no less labored than my own.