She She

Sadie’s unexpected arrival was the elephant in the room the next night as we sat in the living room. Zack had the evening news on and I was looking over my history notes one last time before a test first period tomorrow. We were sitting next to each other, but Zack didn’t have his arm around my shoulders, and his thigh was barely touching mine. It was an odd sensation to sit next to him alone in his house, and not have him touching me in some way.

“Do you have everything memorized?” Zack asked softly a couple minutes later during a commercial break.

I nodded, lining up my papers and placing them on the coffee table. “Yeah, I should be okay.” Zack nodded as well, and the silence continued. I wanted to bring it up, but I didn’t know how. My head was spinning with confusion, and I really just wanted the comfort of having Zack’s arms around me. As the news came back on and Zack’s attention was focused back on the TV, I took it as an opportunity to quickly lift up Zack’s arm and cuddle closer into his side. He glanced down at me and smirked.

“You should have just asked, Riley,” Zack muttered softly.

I shrugged, inhaling the faint scent of Zack’s deodorant and cologne. We sat like this for at least ten minutes, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted closure, or at least an explanation of some kind. What did Sadie mean when she said “good luck?” Was she gone for good, now? I felt my heart start to pound faster as my mind reeled off the millions of possible scenarios in which Sadie showed back up at Zack’s condo. If I hadn’t taken my medicine earlier, I was sure the feeling would blow into a full-fledged panic attack. “Are we gonna talk about it?” I asked quietly. Zack stiffened next to me.

“If you want,” he replied without breaking eye contact with the television.

Well, fuck. I didn’t want to talk about it if he didn’t want to talk about it. “Do you?”

For the first time all night, Zack smiled. “I guess we should, then,” he responded with a soft chuckle. Zack opened his mouth to say something, but closed it immediately after. He struggled for a few more seconds before finally saying, “I guess what Sadie meant before she left was… was that she was always suspicious of me. Of cheating on her when I was away.”

“Did you ever?” I asked, slightly afraid of the answer.

“No, never, I swear it.” His tone was genuine, and honestly, I believed him. I really, really did. “But Sadie, she’s had guys cheat on her, and it really screwed with her mentality. She never really trusted me, no matter how much I tried to show her she could. And I think – I think that’s why she admitted to me that she had cheated. She felt so guilty over it all, like she had turned into those guys who had cheated on her.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, trying to rationalize all of it. Sadie was turning out to be the most complicated person I had met in California. “I want her to be happy,” Zack continued, never once breaking eye contact with me. “But it’s gonna take a really strong guy to deal with her. Not me.”

“She was never really nice to me,” I mumbled, tugging slightly at my jeans. “But I never knew just how –“

Zack cut me off. “It doesn’t excuse the way she treated you, Riley. I just – I don’t know. There’s a lot more to Sadie than meets the eye. Her family life is really screwed up, she’s stuck in a job she hates, and she just has a lot of barriers, you know? To protect herself.” I nodded, because yeah, I had some of those, too. “She was never very good at handling me being away for very long.”

“I – that… that was another thing I wanted to, uh, ask you about…” I started, trailing off towards the end.

He smiled gently and pulled me back into his side. “You want to know when I’m leaving again?” My face paled as he read my mind. “I’ve been doing this for years, Riley,” he explained, hand drawing soft patterns on my upper arm. “I’ve watched all the guys have to tell their girlfriends they were leaving. It’s kind of a shitty conversation.”

I nodded. “I can only imagine…”

“I’m not going anywhere until the summer,” Zack explained. And I smiled brightly for the first time all night, because the summer seemed like a lifetime away.