To Be Alone With You

“What’s up Tempe!”

The crowd cried for us, the sound blaring from the very tops of their lungs. It was our first night back in town after months of being away, the very same cycle we seemed to run over and over and over again. The feeling of being back in Tempe was like crossing a finish line at the end of a marathon – my bones wanted more than anything to just collapse, to just rest, but there was the celebration of crossing that line to be had. And that celebration was that final welcome home concert in Tempe.

“We are The Maine, and let’s rock this house tonight!”

With that, the boys launched into a punchy pop rock tune, reminiscent of our earlier days, even when Ryan and Alex were still around. The movement of the bodies in front of us was like a wave, even in the glaring light pouring on stage. And when I opened my mouth to sing, they only grew wilder. That was the feeling I lived for, that feeling of belonging somewhere. There wasn’t quite another place in the world that I belonged as much as I belonged on stage.

“Let’s get a spotlight on that crowd!” I shouted into my microphone. “I wanna see all the beautiful faces that came out tonight!”

And as the spotlight swiveled out into the audience, my world entirely burst. Lips painted in that same dark hue she always insisted on wearing, hair in loose waves around her shoulders. Josselyn Stevens was in the audience that night, clear as day, watching up at us with tears in her eyes.
And I imagined her there every show since.



As I waited for Josselyn, a weird bubble of nervousness encompassed me, sending my nerves haywire. It was a strange set of circumstances, waiting for a girl to come over to my house rather than picking her up on our way to our dinner. But it wasn’t a date, and I didn’t want it to be. It was a reconciliation, and that was all it could be. Kennedy would kill me if it were anything more. And Kennedy was precisely the reason that I was waiting at my door for Josselyn to come by rather than simply picking her up. It wouldn’t exactly work for me to show up at Kennedy’s in my entirely conspicuous pick up truck and whisk away Josselyn, especially after the fight we had.

Even though they weren’t dating either. She just was staying at his house and kissed him sometimes. Or at least, that’s what I had pieced together from stories that the guys told me when Kennedy wasn’t around. And they got those stories from Kennedy when I wasn’t around.

It was all really weird and confusing, the entire situation. The only thing I could specifically pinpoint was the source: Josselyn Stevens. Just as she always seemed to be.

Seeing her again was completely messing up everything I knew about being angry with someone. I chain smoked for hours every night before going to sleep because I couldn’t get her out of my head, nicotine being the only thing that really soothed me anymore. I believed in my core that she had truly wronged me all those years ago, but something about seeing her again brought out a part of me that I’d forgotten about. The part of me that cared about her.

She was down. She’d been kicked at her very highest and while I would wish it on my worst enemy, I’d come to realize that she was anything but. I didn’t know what was going on, but I could see it in her eyes. Something about her had lost its luster, her thirst for life and everything that came along with it. Josselyn used to be an adventurer. And from what I understood, she spent most of her time alone in Kennedy’s house those days. That wasn’t the Josselyn I knew – and for some reason, that was tearing me apart inside.

I knew I shouldn’t care, and I willed myself daily to not. But it’s hard to spend four years of your life thinking about someone and not care when you see them in pain. It was like losing my religion all over again – I’d lived on the bread of hating Josselyn and then I’d come to find that I really didn’t hate her at all. I just didn’t understand her.

And that’s why I wanted to try again. To get some goddamn answers to all the questions she left me with.

The doorbell rang and I jumped from my place on the couch, taking a deep breath to calm myself. The excitement of potentially figuring out what happened at ASU all those years ago, not to mention decoding why she was so sad recently, was going to make me come off too manic.

“Hey,” she greeted quietly.

She looked beautiful, something that hadn’t changed and I doubted ever would. Lips painted in that same dark hue she always insisted on wearing, hair in loose waves around her shoulders. She looked exactly the same as she did on any other day, which set me at ease. No one was mistaking this outing as a date. Just a meal between friends. But as she wrapped me up in a hug, I couldn’t help but noticed her scent was different than the one she once wore. It was just slightly different, but noticeable to someone who had spent as much time with her as I had.

“Hey,” I replied, recognizing her mom’s car driving off in the distance. It had been years since I’d seen Merrill Stevens. It had been years since I was civilly alone with Josselyn, for that matter.

“I had an idea.” She produced a vinyl bag filled to the brim with Tupperware and plastic bags. “I packed some food. It’s such a nice night, I thought it might be fun to go to our place.”

Our place. A departure from my place. Maybe tonight, we will make some progress, I hoped. Maybe tonight, I’ll finally get some answers.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That sounds kind of like a good idea.”

We piled in my truck and took off for the overlook, the sky still clutching to its last shreds of light. The days were growing shorter as they always did around that time of year, stifling me to no end. I had always been the kind of person to use every scrap of the day, but those days seemed to go a lot faster as the winter drew nearer. As the sun began to dip below the horizon, Josselyn cheerfully detailed the contents she’d prepared for our dinner. My favorite kind of sandwiches, her favorite kind of chips, our favorite kind of sodas. Fresh fruit, the works. Josselyn Stevens knew how to put together something special at the last minute, she always did.

After that, things were quiet for a while. We sat at the overlook, watching the sunset ever so slowly, the sky deepening in gradient shades of blood orange to pitch black at the edges. It was reminiscent of our encounter on that bench just a handful of weeks ago, gazing wordlessly at the world with catching glances at each other in between.

I couldn’t help but take fleeting glimpses at her profile, outlined now by an array of warm hues along the skyline. There was something about Josselyn that was absolutely captivating, even at her darkest moments – she always kept me guessing. Finally, she caught me staring, sending us both into a waterfall of laughter.

“So, we’re starting fresh,” she hummed, finally pulling the food from its watchful container. “Tell me what you’ve been doing for the last few years.

I mumbled a sound of contemplation, leaning back on my hands as she unpackaged our dinner. “Being successful, I guess. Travelling the world Fulfilling my dream. But I guess you know what that’s all about, Miss New-York-City-Works-At-A-Magazine.”

Her expression suddenly turned downtrodden, eyes sad as she handed me my meal. Something I said had struck her, in turn striking me right in the gut. “I um…” she began quietly, taking a bite of her sandwich to distract herself. “I don’t work at the magazine anymore.”

“You don’t?”

“I quit,” she murmured, her eyes searching mine for something more than complacency. “It wasn’t… a healthy environment for me.”

“Oh…” I breathed, sorry for saying anything in the first place.

“But I’m happy for you,” she added, a rare smile returning to her face. “Tell me about it."

So I did. I lost track of the time sharing stories about my experiences travelling around the world, living out my dreams exactly the way I had planned on them happening. We talked about how much I’d changed, how much I’d grown up from the stubborn little boy I’d been in college. We talked about everything in between – her favorite parts of New York, my tales of crazy fans, the best concerts she’d been to.

“I saw you once,” I breathed, my gaze cast so far into the distance not even I could tell where I was looking. I was looking anywhere but her eyes, deep and blue - somehow all-knowing but impossibly clueless. Her attention on me felt heavy, like she’d cut open my limbs and packed them with sand before sewing them up again. The silence between us was just as heavy. She had no idea.

“At the concert you came to, the one in town,” I continued quietly, my lips hardly moving as I spoke. “I don’t think you knew that I saw you, but I did. Right in the middle of the set. I could have died right there when I saw your face through the crowd. I honestly didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”

Silence met me again, a feeling that I was growing increasingly used to. I wanted desperately to know what she was thinking, but she was making no hints toward speaking anytime soon. That was part of the beauty with Josselyn, she was a listener, a real listener, the kind who had all the patience in the world when you were telling a story.

“I don’t think I really knew how to feel,” I sighed. “It was crippling, seeing you. I finally felt like I was over you and then there you were again, tearing me apart. But it wasn’t like an anger thing or a sad thing, I don’t even know what it was. I tried to find you after the show but you were already gone.

“I always wondered why you came, why you thought you needed to be there that night. It was so hard not having any answers. I felt like I was being punished for something, because it was so cruel for me to have that fleeting glimpse of you and to never know why you were there. It messed me up again for a while. It’s hard to forgive you when I keep getting so fucked up over you, and I don’t even know why everything went bad in the first place.”

I glanced over at her, only to see her expression almost completely blank, aside from a subtle tremble that developed in her lower lip. That was her chance to tell me why, to finally explain herself – I gave her the perfect opportunity to finally tell me what happened between us, why she never called. How everything went from perfect to dust in a blink of an eye. Instead, she sat there and said nothing, and I began to wonder if maybe there was really nothing to say.

“At any rate, I wrote a song about it. About you, about us, about whatever the hell was going on at the time. You should go home and listen to it. An acoustic version, I’m sure there’s a good one on the Internet. The producers insisted that it be the way it is on the album, but I wanted it to be acoustic. That’s how I feel it.”

“Okay,” she murmured, her voice barely audible over the roar of the cars below us. I wanted so badly to be angry with her but for some reason, it felt like I had forgotten how to be mad at her. It was a bittersweet type of surrender, finally giving in to the fact that I may never know. She couldn’t tell me, and that was how it was going to be. It was up to me to decide if I could deal with the feeling of not knowing.

“It’s getting late anyway,” I said. “I better take you home.”

She nodded and followed me to the truck, entering through the driver’s side and crawling across the bench to her seat. And as we drove and the moonlight struck the peaks of her face, I decided.