“OK, OK,” I say. “We can agree to disagree.”
He looks at me and shakes his head. “Nope!” he says, laughing. “I don’t accept.”
“Oh, you’re being silly,” I say.
“I am not,” he says. “I have proof.”
“Proof?”
“Cold, hard evidence.”
I stop in place and cross my arms. “This should be good. What’s your proof?”
He stops with me, comes closer toward me. “Exhibit A: Chris Rodriguez.” My senior-year boyfriend.
“Oh, please,” I say. “What does Chris Rodriguez prove?”
“You moved on first. I came home from Berkeley for Christmas ready to knock on your door and sweep you off your feet,” he says. “And the minute I get into town, I hear you’re dating Chris Rodriguez.”
I laugh and roll my eyes just a little bit. “Chris didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t even with him by the time you came home from school for the summer. I thought, you know, maybe you’d come home for those three months and . . .”
He moves his eyebrows up and down at me, the visual version of hubba hubba.
I laugh, slightly embarrassed. “Well, it didn’t matter anyway, right? Because you were with Alicia by then.”
“Only because I thought you were with Chris,” he says. “That’s the only reason I dated her.”
“That’s terrible!” I say.
“Well, I didn’t know that at the time!” he says. “I thought I loved her. You know, I was nineteen years old at that point. I had the self-awareness of a doorknob.”
“So maybe you did love her,” I say. “Maybe it was you who moved on from me.”
He shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “She broke up with me when we got back to school that year. Said she needed someone who could tell her she was the only one.”
“And you couldn’t do that?”
He looks at me pointedly. “Nope.”
It’s quiet again for a moment. Neither of us having much to say or, maybe more accurately, neither of us knowing what to say.
“So we broke each other’s heart,” I say at last. I start walking forward again.
He joins me and smiles. “Agree to disagree,” he says.
We continue walking down the street, stopping at a red light, waiting for a cross signal.
“I never had sex with Chris,” I tell him as we walk farther and farther into the residential section.
“No?” Ethan says.
“No,” I say, shaking my head.
“Any reason why not?” Ethan asks.
I sway my head from side to side, trying to find the words to explain what I felt back then. “I . . . I couldn’t stand the thought of sharing that with someone other than you,” I finally say. “Didn’t seem right to do it with just anybody.”
I was twenty-one by the time I had sex with someone else. It was Dave, my college boyfriend. The reason I slept with him wasn’t that I thought he might mean something to me the way Ethan did. I did it because not doing it was getting weird. If I’m being honest, somewhere along the way, I lost that feeling that the person had to be special, that it was something sacred. “I bet you didn’t turn down Alicia’s advances,” I say, teasing him. For a moment, I think I see him blush.
He guides me toward an ivy-covered building on a dark, quiet street. He opens the lobby door and lets me in first.
“You have me there,” he says. “I’m embarrassed to admit that there have been times in my life when rejection from the woman I love has served only to encourage me sleeping with others. It’s not my best trait. But it does numb the pain.”
“I’m sure it does,” I say.
He guides me to his apartment on the second floor.
“Doesn’t mean anything, though,” he says. “Sleeping with Alicia didn’t mean that I didn’t love you. That I wouldn’t have dropped everything to be with you. If I thought . . . well, you know what I’m getting at.”
I look at him. “Yeah, I do.”
He opens the door and gestures for me to walk in. I look at him and walk in front of him into his place. It’s a studio apartment but big, making it cozy without seeming cramped. It’s neat but not necessarily clean, which is to say that everything is in its place, but there are dust bunnies in the corners, a water ring on the dark wood coffee table. He has painted the walls a deep but unobtrusive blue. A flat-screen TV is mounted on the wall opposite the couch, and shelves overloaded with books cover every available space. His bed linens are a dark, forgiving gray. Did I know, back then, that this was the kind of adult he’d grow up to be? I don’t know.
“It was very hard to get over you,” he says.
“Oh, yeah?” I say. There is a lump in my throat, but I try to cover it up by being flirtatious and light. “What was so hard to get over?”
He throws his keys onto a side table. “Three things,” he says.
I smile, letting him know I’m ready to listen. “These should be good!”
“I’m serious. Are you ready to hear them? Because I’m not messing around.”
“I’m ready,” I say.
Ethan puts up his thumb to start the count. “One,” he says. “You always had your hair up, just like it is now, in that high bun thing. And very occasionally, you would take it down.” He pauses and then starts again. “I just loved that moment. That moment between up and down, when it fell across your neck and around your face.”
I find myself fiddling with the bun on the top of my head. I have to stop myself from adjusting it. “OK,” I say.
“Two,” he says. “You always tasted like cinnamon and sugar.”
I laugh. If I wasn’t sure before, I am now positive that he is being sincere. “From the cinnamon rolls.”
He nods. “From the cinnamon rolls.”
“And what’s the third?” I ask. I almost don’t want to know, as if it’s the third thing he says that will undoubtably and irrevocably usher forth all those teenage feelings, a flood of blushing cheeks and quickening heartbeats. It is the teenage feelings that are the most intoxicating, the ones that have the power to render you helpless.
“You smelled like tangerines,” he says.
I give him a look. “Orange Ginger.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You always smelled like Orange Ginger.” He comes ever so close to my neck. “Still do.”
He is close enough that I can smell him, too, the mixture of laundry detergent and sweat.
I can feel the skin of my cheeks start to burn, my pulse start to speed up.
“You smell good, too,” I say. I don’t move away.
“Thank you,” he says.
“In high school, you smelled like Tide.”
“I think that’s what my mom used,” he says.
“When you left, I smelled your old T-shirts,” I say. “I used to sleep in them.”
He listens to me. He takes my words, my feelings, and he spits them back out into facts. “You loved me,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did. I loved you so much it sometimes burned in my chest.”
He leans forward ever so slightly. “I want to kiss you,” he says.
I breathe in. “OK,” I say.
“But I don’t want to do this if . . . I don’t want this to be a one-time thing.”
“I don’t know what it is,” I say. “But it’s not a one-time thing.”
He smiles and leans in.
It’s gentle at first, the touch of lip to lip, but I lean into it, and when I do, it overtakes us.
We back up to the closed front door behind us, my shoulders just grazing the door frame.
His lips move just like they used to, and his body feels just like it used to, and as much as two people can rewind the clock, as much as they can erase time, we do.
By the time we’re in his bed, it feels as if we never left each other. It feels as if we never broke up, my parents never moved, I never started dating Chris Rodriguez, and Ethan never met Alicia Foster. It feels as if I never felt the chill of Boston in my hands or the wind of D.C. in my hair. As if I never felt the rain of Portland and Seattle on my shoulders or the heat of Austin on my skin. It’s as if New York City, and all of its disappointments, never entered my heart.