Answering Machine

“What are you thinking about?”

I turned my head to the side to look at John, whose eyes weren’t even on me. Rather, his gaze was fixed across the river and to the field beyond it, staring down the telephone wires.

“How much I’m going to miss you,” I told him quietly after a moment. He looked at me then, smiling sadly, before turning his attention back to the horizon.

“You’re not going to miss me,” he laughed lightly, fidgeting with an unraveling thread at the edge of a hole in his jeans.

“That’s not true!” I protested, sitting up and turning back to face him, a serious look spread across my face. “Why would you say that?”

“Because,” he muttered, still avoiding my gaze as he folded his knees and hugged them to his chest with his arms, “you’re going to New York, Linds. You’re not going to have time to miss me.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I accused. I could practically feel it already, anyway – the unbearable ache that was going to overcome me as soon as I stepped on my plane tomorrow morning. When John didn’t respond, I sat back on my heels, still facing him, and sent him a concerned look. “John?”

“I don’t want you to leave,” he admitted after a few more moments of silence. He looked up at me with an expression I was positive I had never before seen from him. It was somewhere between pained and hopeful, and I didn’t know what to think of it.

“I’m not going away forever,” I reminded him with a slight smile as I moved closer to him.

We were camped out in the bed of his truck at the edge of the park on the bank of a small river. The sun was setting, and in twelve hour’s time, I would be heading east to New York. In twelve hour’s time, I would be leaving my best friend, the boy I’d secretly been in love with, for all these years, and I would be damned if I didn’t spend every last second of my final day in Arizona with him, no matter the protests from my parents.

“I know,” he sighed. “It’s just – it sounds pathetic, but we’ve never been away from each other for more than a week or two at a time.”

“It won’t be that bad,” I promised. “I’m going to be home for holidays, and you’re going to start touring soon, and you know I’ll be at every show of yours in the tri-state area.”

John didn’t say anything. Instead, he held out his pinky, and I grinned, hooking my own with his.

“You better be there, Thompson,” he warned.

“I will be,” I assured him once more. He nodded and smiled, although I could still see a hint of that strange, unfamiliar look in his eyes. “You don’t seem convinced.”

“It’s not that,” he sighed after a minute or two of contemplation. “It’s just – I don’t – Shit.”

I looked at him quizzically, with a raised eyebrow.

“What?”

“I just really don’t want you to leave, Linds.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but he held up a silencing finger and took a breath before looking back up at me.

“Because I’m about to tell you something, I think, and it could either go really well, or really, really horribly,” he began. “I mean, I could royally fuck things up, here, Lindsay.”

“John, I don’t – “

“And it just sucks that I waited this long to do it, you know?”

No, I didn’t know, I wanted to tell him. But I resisted, as curiosity got the better of me and I waited for him to continue.

“I mean, there is probably no guy in the universe with as bad timing as me. Because if I hadn’t waited so long, if I had said this sooner, then things could have been different. A lot different. And now you’re going to leave and… Okay, you know what? Fuck it. I’m just going to tell you.”

I sat there, facing him, as he closed his eyes momentarily and racked his brain for the right words. When he finally settled on them, he opened his eyes and looked right at me.

“We’ve been best friends for a long time, right? I mean, a really long time. But, the thing is, Linds, you’ve been so much more than just my best friend for a while.”

I felt my entire body tense, wondering if he was really saying what I had just heard. Judging by the look in his eyes, though, and the way he moved a little bit closer to me, I’d heard him correctly.

“And it’s probably a long shot to hope that maybe you might feel the same way, but it’s worth it, right? Because I think – no, I’m absolutely sure – that I love you, Lindsay.”

He was so close as he murmured those last words that made my breath catch in my throat and made my heart pound absolutely uncontrollably. My palms were getting clammy, although I wasn’t exactly sure why. I shouldn’t have been nervous, right? I felt the same way about him, and he was the one who had just professed his feelings without knowing how I would respond. There was no gamble for me; I knew how he felt, and all I had to do was tell him.

But I couldn’t.

My voice just wouldn’t work, and I didn’t know why. I took deep breaths and tried to make myself croak those three syllables back to him, but no sound came out. His expression turned even more nervous than it had previously been.

The only thing I could think to do, the only thing that my mind kept telling me to do, was just to try it. So I did. I leaned forward slightly, awkwardly closing the gap between John and myself, and pressed my lips hesitantly to his.

He seemed confused at first, and maybe even a bit shocked, but he eventually caught on and kissed me back. It was slow and strange at first. John’s hands were still clasped around his knees, which were folded between us, until he slowly moved one to rest on my cheek, brushing back wisps of my hair as he did so. I could feel the curve of his lips against mine as he smiled softly, and my heart swelled a thousand times.

My hands, which had until now been resting awkwardly by my sides, made their way to John’s shoulders. He let his knees fall from their folded position, and his hand fell from my face and met the other at the small of my back, pulling me closer.

“Why?” I asked, pulling myself back the slightest bit. His breath still hit my skin, and I closed my eyes for a moment before reopening them to find John looking at me with a curious expression.

“Why what?” he asked, moving his hand to my face once again, pushing stray hairs behind my ear.

“Why me?”

“Because I don’t want it to be anyone else,” he whispered, leaning his head forward so his nose brushed against mine before our lips met once more.

The fact that I was kissing my best friend barely came to the forefront of my thoughts for a while, until we found ourselves lying down, with my hands laced in his hair and his fingertips running over my hips. I felt my entire body flush as John’s kisses became less innocent, his lips leaving my lips for my jaw, my neck, and my collarbone. With barely a thought, my hands fell down his chest and to the waist of his jeans.

“Linds,” he breathed, pulling away so he hovered above, staring at me. My eyes fluttered and I grinned softly, listening to how he said my name in a way I’d never heard. I looked up at him, and just from the way his eyes searched my face, I knew he was questioning what was going to happen next. All I did, though, was smile again and pull him back down to me.

I woke up to my phone vibrating somewhere near my arm. I groaned, opening my eyes one at a time, and began to search for my phone, before I stopped. My heart began to pound as I realized that I was freezing, under a somewhat scratchy blanket, with an arm draped around me. My phone finally stopped buzzing and I rolled over as best I could, coming face to face with John. His eyes were closed, and his nostrils flared every so often as he breathed quietly, and I let out a sigh.

In his sleep, John ran his hand over my bare lower back and pulled me closer. The previous night played in my mind like a short film, and with each play I became more and more nervous. Had he meant it? Had we meant it? I didn’t want to think about the possibility that John didn’t love me the way I thought I did, the way I loved him, but the idea plagued my thoughts.
I stared at his face, studying the freckles across his nose, his long eyelashes, the way his hair fell over his face and the line of his jaw. It was just dawn, and I didn’t want to forget the way he looked in the light.

With a jump, I realized that dawn meant it was morning, and that I had to be on a plane to New York in a few hours. I quickly felt around for my clothes, and somehow squirmed out of John’s grasp to pull them on. A blush rose to my cheeks the entire time, as I thought about what we had done in an incredibly conspicuous, public place, and I somehow managed to redress myself without waking John, though I’m sure I made one hell of a ruckus.

As I grabbed my bag that was propped in the corner of the bed of the truck, I looked down at John, my heart lurching instantly. My eyes welled with hot tears as I struggled with the decision of whether or not to wake him. What happens next? I kept asking myself. My phone vibrated in my hand, and I looked down to see that it was my mother calling, for what must have been the thirteenth time that morning.

I blinked slowly, giving into the tears that brimmed from my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back under the scratchy blanket with John and lay next to him, to let him hold me and tell me that he loved me over and over again. I wanted him to wake up, to pull me back towards him and tell me not to leave, or at least that we would figure it out if I left.

None of that happened though. John didn’t wake up, I didn’t lie back down, and neither of us said a word. Instead, I swung my legs over the edge of the truck and climbed down, refusing to look back as I jogged back towards our neighborhood.