i. The First
He was her first in a list of firsts: first kiss, even though that should have been in high school; first hook up, although that should have been in college. He was a second or third love though, but the first to ever leave her imagination and take root in reality. He hovered in liminal limerence through 1L, in late night chats in her dorm room, last minute tutoring in his, and ice cream dates in Harvard Square. Toeing a line but never crossing it. You could read into it or you could not. She read into it.
For once, she was right.
She was right, but she wasn’t right for long. He kissed her at midnight after spring finals at a Back Bay club and maybe the kiss turned her into a pumpkin, but he fled from her that summer, fled across the country to sunny California, to his sunny girlfriend, the girl he never spoke about. But they kept talking and when she tried to talk about them, he sniped that she could not unilaterally impose conversations on him. She then unilaterally imposed her silence and hoped he would break, miss her friendship, and realize that she was the girl for him.
But she cracked before he did and she would later speculate if that was what went wrong. That she should have held firm on her gag order, but she wasn’t sure if his silence meant that he respected her decision or if he’d forgotten about her with a quickness that she didn’t want him to forget her.
She didn’t want him to forget her because she couldn’t forget him and that didn't seem fair that he could forget her and leave her with her inability to forget him.
And he remembered her, after the long yawn of summer had closed and they returned to Cambridge, he remembered her with his mouth, his hands, his nose, his eyes, parts of his body she had seen before but not like this, parts of his body she had never seen before and, didn't know it then, but would not see again for years.
Some of what he did, she liked. Some of what he did, she did not and although she asked him to stop, he was not as quick to comply as he should have been.
She left his apartment early the next morning, braless under a bright sun. It was her first walk of shame, down Mass Ave in its early morning slowness. She hadn’t slept a wink. It was her first time spending her night next to a man. He was a quiet sleeper, but maybe it was because the sheets weren’t tucked tightly into his bed or the feel of his warm, naked skin pressed against her warm, naked skin was bizarre, but her mind buzzed all night. She can’t remember with what. She just remembers waiting until it would be morning enough for her to leave. At the light, she started sliding away from him only to feel his arm pull her back and hold her tightly. For a moment, she felt wanted. But then she thought he had probably mistaken her for his girlfriend in his sleepiness.
He kissed her and his eyes were closed and she thought do you really want me do you really want me do you really want me do I mean anything to you do I mean anything to you do I mean anything to you.
She thinks his lips were soft, but she doesn’t exactly remember. It was so long ago, and her head had been so full.
ii. Touching
The next night, they were in Cape Cod with their friends and she gave him a black eye. She asked, and drunkenly, he permitted. She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she thought it would be funny, the juxtaposition between having his dick in her mouth one night and her fist in his eye the next. Maybe it was latent frustration, anger at the winter months of being led on and at the summer months of being left alone. Or maybe she punched him because she wanted to touch him again, touch him with meaning, the kind of touch that was sustained and impactful, and this was the only way he would let her touch him.
“There’s two kinds of touching,” he said to her, running the faucet cold after she’d landed the shiner. “Good touching and bad touching. This was bad touching.”
Neighbors must have called, because the Wellfleet Police came soon after. Someone joked that this had almost been a domestic incident and she warmed at the thought of anything domestic between them.
iii. Subtext
There’s another story here, that starts from the night he’d kissed her at midnight in the Back Bay club and she’d turned into a pumpkin. The night of their first kiss. The night of her first kiss. He had been bleary-mouthed, blurry-eyed drunk.
She’d avoided him all night and he got progressively drunker. She maintained her distance, waiting for him to come to her, but finally, after watching him spend the whole night talking to everyone else in the club, she approached him. They spoke about something, she doesn’t remember what, but she remembers him pushing her away. She took the push personally, started dancing with someone else, he cut in, pulled her towards the bar, gently bit her hand, her nose, her cheek, and finally kissed her. Her eyes were closed and she heard their friends cheer. He also tried to grab her ass underneath her tights but she doesn’t think anyone saw that.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
“What about you?”
“What about your girlfriend?”
He didn’t have an answer for that. She hadn’t belabored the point out of morality, out of concern for his girlfriend or even concern for him. What she had wanted him to say: My girlfriend doesn’t matter. You’re what matters. What he did: left the club and when she called him, he mumbled something and hung up. The next morning, he told her he had lost his phone, passed out in the business center of the Copley Place Westin, and didn’t recall a thing from the night before.
When they spoke again, in her brown-carpeted white-walled dorm room, about the second time, the night she spent eyes open with him, he sat in a black office chair pushed into the farthest corner of the small room and the first thing he said was: “We can never do this again.”
The seventh thing he said was: “We are fundamentally incompatible.”
The tenth thing he said was: “I have feelings for you. Some of them are even positive.”
She asked him if it were futile between them, begged for a yes or no answer and the thirteenth thing he said was: “Just stop liking me, just stop liking me.”
The eighteenth thing he said was: “You know, if I had hooked up with a girl the way you hooked up with me that first night, you would have said it was rape.”
“You think I raped you?!”
“No, I don’t think you raped me.” And his voice was thoughtful, as though he had contemplated the question. She did not say anything about what he may or may not have done to her.
The penultimate thing he said was: “When I decide, I’ll let you know.”
He said some other things but she doesn’t remember them.
iv. The Question
She sat with the question of rape for a while. Long after they had stopped talking, she started regretting her first kiss. When she had thought about it, in those early months, when she still had hope for them, it hadn’t worried her as much. He had initiated it and the midnight kiss at the ball was the logical culmination of the story they had been living and it would all be borne out by their happily ever after. Years later, she wondered if their second night had been his attempt to regain control from the first night. Or maybe the second night had been in the same mold as the first. Or maybe he had regretted missing their first night and wanted to remember what he had forgotten. She hoped it was the latter but sometimes her stomach would double over that it was the former.
Of course, it was never discussed again, and she learned to bury it.
v. Looking forward to your response
After that conversation in her dorm room, she didn’t see him for a month. She heard he had been seen around Cambridge, taking his girlfriend to cozy dinners. She didn’t follow up with him on his decision, as though for the shittiest job interview ever. He has, to this date, never explicitly let her know his decision. Maybe he hasn’t decided. Or maybe he’s letting his actions speak for him. Maybe he just forgot. Maybe he doesn’t care. Or maybe he would just rather not.
Around this time, she deleted him from Facebook, deleted his number from her phone, deleted all their text messages, blocked him from her GChat. She could not, however, bring herself to delete their reams of GChats (435 in total). A black and white testament of their frisson. Even now, a search for any phrase in her inbox turns up at least half a dozen GChats with him and she likes the reminder that he used to be so much in her life—and she used to be so much in his although she doubts he searches his inbox as much as she hers.
First Interlude
She dates other men (two musicians, two lawyers), loses her virginity, and tries to forget him, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, rip him out, fuck him out.
Second Interlude
Sometimes she looks at him and her eyes are heavy with love. Sometimes she looks at him and feels nothing.
vi. Eyes
She can feel his eyes on her at a house party a month after he tells her that he will let her know. On her arms as they twine the neck of a boy whose name she can’t remember, but who was taller than him and blonder than him; she sees him gather his friends and gawk. Later, he stumbles upon her in the cold, on the boy’s lap on a back porch, where he had no reason unless he was looking for her. She thought. (Four years later he would claim he was “trying to take a leak.” Okay.) She texts him at 3 AM, after she and the boy have parted ways: Hey, don’t mention what you saw. Thanks! She sees him only infrequently after that.
Two years later, the night before graduation, she refuses to feel his eyes on her. She feels instead the glass dewing between her fingers and the cool May breeze blowing through the Daedalus rooftop. The full moon shines above, encasing Harvard’s spires in silver. She speaks to a male friend, and she hears him raise his voice, catches him cut his eyes towards her. Her friend says, “Your boy keeps looking over.” She smiles coolly. He’s been looking for years, and nothing has changed.
vii. Him
MarrymeMarrymeMarryme. This is his girlfriend’s demand. A capstone to their six-year relationship, their six-year relationship which persists, propelled by a life of its own, through his distance and his infidelities. He once told someone that he thought his girlfriend loved him more than he loved her.
He didn’t admit it then, but he likes it. He likes the power, the safety of this disparity in their love. He fears its loss, needs it more than he admits. He needs the steadiness of her love, which withstands his coldness and his heat. He needs to know that however he acts, his girlfriend will remain steadfast. If he loved her more, he could not be this selfish. If his girlfriend loved him less, he could not be this selfish.
As a child, he had nightmares about being felled by Medusa the Gorgon, with her stone-eyed stare and snaking green-and-black curls. She thought it had indicated his fear of what a woman, who truly held power over him, could do to him. He wonders if there is some truth to that.
(This is what she envisions.)
viii. Opportunities
Sometimes, she considers whether she keeps missing opportunities. They coalesce later, the moments where she knows she could have acted, maybe shifted the delicate alchemy of the equation. They coalesce when they’re out of her control and fear does not alter the calculus. They coalesce when she can do nothing and face no repercussions. She once said to him, “I only take something when it falls to me handed on a platter,” and he said, with his own tongue, “I’m handing myself to you,” and she did not take him, because she could not believe that those words had been spoken to her.
viii.a. Opportunities (A List of Nights)
In Nashville, weeks before graduation, when, after almost two years of pretending she were a ghost, he spent the night intertwining his fingers in hers (romantic) and grabbing her ass (lascivious). In a game of “Never Have I Ever”, she decided it was appropriate to raise his previous infidelity (“Never have I ever cheated on a significant other”). She then watched his finger fall, saw him shift away, felt his walls rise. Later, they found themselves alone, her arms around his neck, his arms encircling her waist. She stood still and he stepped away.
At the end of her birthday night, crammed in the back of a cab with their friends, the driver playing an old Urdu ghazal she recognized from her childhood (“Qata na keeje taaluq humse / kuch nahin hai to adaavat hi sahi”). Her head cradled on his shoulder, his head on hers, her hand on his stomach, their fingers almost touching. She could have held his hand. He could have held hers. They did neither.
A winter night at a West Village tiki bar, after they had moved to New York for their Big Law jobs, long after she thought everything between them had dissolved. He winked at her (an inside joke, funny only to them); she blew him a kiss. Same night, another bar. Their legs slipped together lightly, almost imperceptibly, their faces so close that if she were to speak, their lips would touch. She turned away, unsure of his intentions.
Maybe there were more opportunities or maybe they were all imagined.
Third Interlude
She’ll see another world sometimes: a great glass apartment looking out on the nebula of Manhattan, the black hole of Central Park. In this life, she softens into him; he makes her laugh with how clumsily his heartland tongue twists the Urdu phrases she teaches him. When they are together, the need for anyone else evaporates.
It slides past her skin, a parallel universe, the outcome that should have been.
ix. Love
It is midnight again, three years and four months since he turned her into a pumpkin. They are in cavernous West Village beer hall and he kisses her, this time on the temple. “I love you,” he says matter-of-factly. And she knows he means it. He then turns to their friend, a brawny guy whom she had referred to earlier that day as “a rock with glasses,” and offers him the same treatment, a papal kiss on the forehead and an “I love you.” And it’s a cosmic joke, this evenly applied ex post facto platonic tenderness. This, this declaration of love for which she has been waiting on-and-off for four years comes packaged as a buy-one-get-one declaration of brotherly affection.
A few months later she texts him on his birthday: “Happy birthday, kid. You’re the most Scorpio Scorpio I know.” He writes back, quickly, “Thanks. Love you too” and a popping sound, like gunshots, fires in her head.
x. Culmination (not Satisfaction)
Hey, we need to talk, she texts. He does not reply. Hey, I’ll be in your area tonight. We should meet up somewhere and have that talk. He does not reply. Do you think that if you ignore me, I’ll just die? she texts. He does not reply. She does not die.
A part of her knew it was inevitable. On a hot, sake-and-liquor-filled summer night in the East Village, she had tumbled into the bed he shared with his girlfriend, in the apartment he shared with his girlfriend. (At last, an opportunity grasped.) (She realizes later that she drinks with him, always in the hope that lightning strikes thrice.) Her back fell against the soft blue sheets his girlfriend had put down for him before leaving on vacation and when he removed his glasses, she could count the faint freckles on his nose (six) and the creases at the downturn of his eyes (three apiece). All the while, she thought, This is an error, this is an error and he worked on her with a determination that made her think that he believed this would never happen again.
In the morning light, they erred again and as they erred, she looked at the wooden dresser hugging the wall with its mess of papers and jewelry and a book: The Five Love Languages. Evidence of the girl she knew she never felt quite guilty enough about cuckolding. As they lay together in the aftermath, he plucked a strand of her curling black hair from his chest, so different from his girlfriend’s wispy blonde, and padded out of the bedroom. She heard the toilet flush.
When he returned, she asked him, “Do you have other sidechicks?”
He hesitated. “There is only one person for whom I have an occasional weakness.”
“Who?” After a long pause: “Oh.” Three heartbeats later: “How long have you wanted me?” (What she did not have the courage to ask: How long have you had feelings for me?)
“Probably as long as you’ve wanted me.”
(Four years, nine months since the very first time she spoke to him at a sexual harassment seminar on their very first day of law school.)
(Who can say why.)
When the clock struck nine, an hour before his girlfriend’s flight from Europe landed, he hustled her out of the Upper East Side apartment. They kissed at the door and when she asked, “If I want to do this again, can I have a raincheck?” he replied, after a pause, “You can have your raincheck. But never put that in writing.”
And she was struck by how, even in passion, he calculated.
xi. The Unspeaking
In the next month of unpunctuated quiet, after the postpartum numbness of what they had done faded, she thought of fate and love. A friend once said that watching them interact was like watching a game of chess and she thought she finally had him in check. When they encountered each other at last at a party on a Williamsburg rooftop, the city starlit and sparkling behind them, he did not look in her eye, embraced her only lightly, left shortly, and when she told him they needed to talk, more so to inspire fear than anything, he said, “Okay.”
But they didn’t talk, and she should have known. In the thick, smoky wall of his silence she threw text after text, but he gulped them down without a word. She lobbed a last grenade: “I hate you icing me out like this. If we are friends, then please remember to treat me as one.” He finally replied, “Obviously we are friends. I don’t want to talk right now.”
Obviously.
With the terms thus dictated, she imagined encountering him in their thirties, a chance and brief meeting on the subway, leaving him wonderstruck and full of regret. She imagined, at last, a permanent fracture with his girlfriend, and his recognition of her as his soulmate (but this was too easily mired in the complexity of their history, the questions too long unanswered). She imagined nobly setting aside their friendship so they could move forward and apart: “You’ve always meant a great deal to me, but thrice we have proven ourselves incapable of perpetual propriety and so, our friendship must be ended.”
Of course, none of this happened. She was quiet and cowardly, and he was quiet and cowardly and when they spoke again, at a gathering at McSorley’s with its sawdust floors, it was with their old ease and warmth. It was early fall, just as the air crisped and the leaves waxed red and yellow. That night, blocks away from where he had asked her to come home with him, she learned that he and his girlfriend were buying an apartment together, a New York City commitment deep as marriage. All the words that could have been spoken were mooted in her mouth, ridiculous now, ending their whatever-it-was not with a bang or even a whisper but with emptiness. It had been inevitable, probably even deserved.
And it was over. She tried to force herself to understand that it was over. Four years and five months after he had turned her into a pumpkin, she became a woman again—although a part of her (that she would vociferously deny if asked) continued to believe something more yet remained.
xii. Epilogue
This time, it is her turn to flee across the country, to her dream job, and this, this last and final end breaks and reconstructs her crystallized heart in a boomerang loop. As her departure ticks nearer, her friends fête and dine her around the city and his silence grows louder until it becomes clear that he does not want to see her, that for him, nothing remains between them. It is a hollow realization, all the pain of it scooped away, dosed out over the years, that she had only imagined him after all.
N.H Azmi has participated in several fiction writing workshops, including one with Joan Wickersham at Harvard University and Ted Thompson with the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop. Her writing has been published by Slate, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Colorlines, among others.
Cover photo: Photo on Foter.com